“Contractors.”
“Exactly. Don’t ever think the nice boys at Langley or the Hoover building are above using dirty knives to cut their meat with. They got ’em on speed dial.”
Paula shook her head. “And what do I do?”
“I need your car. Catch a cab back to Hertz and rent something. We’ll work it out later.”
“That’s easy — but wait a minute. You can go to Cross with this.”
“What I’ve got on Quinn is too hot. And I can’t prove anything yet. If Cross knew about it at this point he’d have a helluva dilemma.”
“Where’ll you go?”
“Don’t know yet, but you haven’t talked to me.”
CHAPTER 19
Warfield headed northeast out of Washington, stopped at a mom and pop motel a few miles across the state line in Pennsylvania, registered under the name Pete Moore, avoiding even his aliases, and paid in cash. He’d jotted notes as he drove and now he looked them over from the perspective of a fugitive.
He called his voicemail and listened to a message Joe Morgan had left for Warfield at ten-forty that morning. Helen Swope hadn’t shown up for the meeting. No word from Helen or Filmore Dunstan, her attorney. Morgan was afraid Helen had decided against changing her testimony, but maybe the weather delayed her. The second call was from Fleming. She was fine.
He looked out of his window as he waited for the final message to queue. It was almost dark at mid-afternoon. The wind howled through the trees and he wondered how they could bend so much without breaking.
The message played. It was a second call from Morgan, at noon. Warfield strained to hear the recording over the line static. Morgan was pumped this time and said Warfield was to call him immediately.
When Warfield dialed him back, the line crackled, making communication difficult.
“Glad it’s you,” Morgan said. “Veronica’s about to run me out of my office, but listen to this, Warfield. Helen Swope was strangled to death in her bed last night.”
Warfield was stunned.
“Her lawyer’s dead too. Shot in the head as he—”
The line scratched and crackled before going dead. Warfield redialed and got a phone company recording that said phone lines were down in some D.C. areas due to winds from Veronica.
He hung up and put this news flash from Morgan into the equation. A few short hours earlier Warfield told Quinn that Helen Swope was going to tell Morgan this morning she had lied about Ana. Now both Helen and her attorney were dead — murdered. Warfield barely escaped the same fate — so far. He stood there watching the rain fly sideways by the window as he tried to put it all together.
“Oh, God!..Ana!” Warfield mumbled. Quinn was eliminating everyone who held keys to his history. Ana would have known Quinn aliased as Donald O. Goodwin and now she was going to die for knowing it. She was not safe from Quinn even locked up in the ADC. Look at Joplan, for example.
He remembered meeting an officer Holden at the Alexandria Detention Center, where Ana was being held until they assigned her to a federal prison. He got the AT&T operator to try the line, hoping it was still in service.
“ADC.” The line was noisy.
“Holden. Got a Holden there?”
“Captain Holden. One moment.”
“Aubrey Holden.”
“Holden, Cam Warfield.”
“Colonel Warfield! Help you with something?”
“Ana Koronis! Everything okay with her?”
Holden laughed. “Pretty revved when I saw her few hours ago. I guess you know that the CIA guy, what’s his name…Quinn? got her a pass for the weekend.”
“She’s with Quinn?” That was very bad news, but Warfield wasn’t totally surprised.
“Yes, sir. I got an order to release her into Mr. Quinn’s custody until Monday morning.”
“Tell me that you know where they were going, Holden!”
“No idea, sir.”
“You’ve got to find out, Holden. Now.”
“I don’t…well, hold a second. I’ll see if anybody knows.”
Holden was back a minute later. “Deputy Brighton here, he escorted Koronis to Mr. Quinn’s car. Said Mr. Quinn told Ms. Koronis they were going to ‘AC.’ That mean Atlantic City, you think?”
“When did they leave?”
“This morning, right after eight.”
Warfield hung up and ran through his options. It wouldn’t be easy to stop Quinn. After all, who in all of law enforcement had the will, the capacity — the thought that he could be a criminal — to apprehend the widely-known director of central intelligence? Even Ana, in the dark about all of this, would laugh at the absurdity of it if anyone attempted to save her from Quinn. Cross was the only possibility, but Ana could be dead by the time it took Warfield to make the case to Cross that the man he loved like a brother was a traitor and a murderer. Even then, how much longer would it take Cross to assimilate the facts to the point of action?
Cross was not the answer. Warfield clicked on the motel room’s vintage TV and stood there while the tubes warmed up. Under normal conditions, Atlantic City would be ninety minutes max from his motel, but the Weather Channel showed Veronica moving northward now, paralleling the coast with winds at speed of hundred and twenty. A spokesman from the National Hurricane Center couldn’t say where or when she would turn westward to land, but the wind and rain would continue. Warfield knew it would only get worse as he drove closer to the coast.
He took I-95 north. The interstate was less prone to flood than the secondary roads he used earlier to avoid Quinn’s thugs. It was three p.m. when he turned south at Philadelphia to take the Atlantic City Expressway. The weather had traffic crawling at a time when he needed to make speed. Quinn and Ana, hours ahead of him, had reached Atlantic City by now — if Holden was correct.
On the radio, the announcer said the New Jersey governor ordered the national guard to duty earlier in the day because of the threat from Veronica. The hurricane center broke in and said it now looked like the eye of the storm would hit a few miles down the coast from Atlantic City. Landfall should be around ten p.m. with winds near a hundred and thirty-five miles per hour. The accompanying storm surge could be as high as eighteen feet and would precede the eye of the storm by around five hours. Residents in Atlantic City and New Jersey coastal areas were ordered by the governor to evacuate.
That meant Warfield had two hours to get to the Golden Touch before the storm surge — evacuation or not. He was an hour from there in normal conditions but at the present rate he needed some luck. There were no cars going in his direction but he couldn’t make out the roadway if he drove faster than forty.
The maximum storm surge occurs to the right of the center of the storm as it goes onto land, and it is that dome of water, pushed up at sea by the winds and low atmospheric pressure, that causes the most deaths and property destruction. Far out at sea, the water dome dissipates and causes no harm, but as the ocean floor rises to shore the water is forced up with it and rushes inland. Category four hurricanes, with winds up to one-fifty-five, hammer anything near the shore with giant waves and wreckage from other structures. The water action can undermine foundations and even topple buildings. Roofs, windows and doors become airborne. Low-lying areas are flooded. Deaths are common among people who can’t get out of the way soon enough, or who say no to leaving their homes. Electric power is lost, which means stores and gasoline stations are down. The result is many deaths, billions of dollars in property destruction and total paralysis in the affected areas. Warfield flashed the thought of the Katrina victims and all the chaos in New Orleans afterward, and the more recent Sandy that devastated New Jersey and New York just months earlier.