Warfield waited no longer. In a swift move, he swept up and fired the clock-missile to the predetermined point with all the force he could summon from the awkward position he was in, and folded into a low profile on the floor at the same moment. The clock left his hand even before he could see Quinn in his peripheral vision.
The clock hit the wall—not Quinn. Quinn had anticipated it and moved, or Warfield was off-target. Where was Quinn now? Warfield spun around, but Quinn was no longer standing there, and then Warfield heard the gun discharge. Warfield fell to the floor.
In the moments that followed, Warfield realized he wasn’t hit but Quinn had disappeared. Then he heard groans coming from a pair of double doors beyond the point where Quinn stood seconds earlier. They were locked, but Warfield stood to the side and used the axe to break in. Austin Quinn lay stretched out on the bed, one hand over his stomach, the other dangling off the side. The .38 lay on the floor.
A moderate amount of blood seeped from the wound where the bullet entered Quinn’s right temple. His face was white, his muscles twitched and his eyes were dull. Warfield found a weak pulse. He ran to another room and found Ana alive but in deep sleep. He couldn’t rouse her. He bounded down the stairwell to the lobby, hoping to find a medical-emergency crew. The lobby was ankle deep in water now and no one was in sight. He ran to the top of the escalator, and through the rain saw a vehicle plowing through the water a few yards from the building. It turned out to be the AAAV heading toward the Golden Touch. When it got closer he made out Damn Right Donaldson with O’Hare and Gonzales. What a beautiful sight.
The AAAV stopped at the edge of the lobby. “Decided I better check on you, Warfield. You got more lives than a litter of cats, but one of these days you’re gonna use ’em all up.”
President Cross stood by his desk in the Oval Office and pressed the phone hard against his ear. He didn’t believe he was hearing Warfield right. It was the static.
Warfield spoke louder and slower this time. “It’s about Quinn. He shot himself, Mr. President!”
“Quinn? My God!”
“May not make it.”
“What…what happened?”
The line improved a bit and Warfield took a minute to sketch out the scene. “I know this is a personal matter for you, sir, as well as political, but there are some urgent decisions.”
Cross knew Warfield was right. The president had to deal with realities first, emotions later. “Give me the situation!”
“I’m with Quinn now in Atlantic City. General Donaldson with the guard here in Jersey, he’s getting us to a trauma center.”
“You stay with Austin until I get somebody there to manage information. It won’t be quick, the weather as it is, but the press can’t get there either. And Cam, don’t talk to anyone.”
“Tell me what you know, Cam,” Cross said. It was Sunday afternoon in the Oval Office and the storm had subsided. Warfield had returned from Philadelphia that morning and showered at the White House before meeting with Cross. He hadn’t yet been back to see the destruction at his own place.
He laid out both the hard and the circumstantial evidence: Quinn’s Paris trip. Randall Coffman. The Donald O. Goodwin alias. Suri. Helen Swope. Quinn’s warnings to back off. The attempts on Warfield’s life. Quinn’s revelations to Warfield in the moments before he shot himself.
Then Warfield went back to the beginning with what he’d learned from Tom Holden minutes before paying his visit to Quinn: Karly’s murder, Gallardi’s role after her death, Maria Sanchez’s role and Magliacci’s blackmail.
Warfield laid out his theory that Quinn, desperate for money to pay Magliacci, placed a confederate inside the Atlanta prison right after Warfield revealed in the Oval Office meeting that Joplan had a contact with deep pockets. This operative extracted the contact information from Joplan and killed him. Armed with that information, Quinn had Joplan’s contact, Pierre, all to himself. Once Quinn and Pierre exchanged the CIA list and the money, Seth orchestrated the movement of Petrevich and the uranium from Moscow to Tokyo. The crossing into Iraq was a red herring that worked. It was easy to believe Petrevich’s destination was the Middle East. Certainly anywhere other than Tokyo.
Cross was destroyed by it all and when Warfield finished he shook his head. “So Austin did this. I guess I never knew him.”
“He used Ana to lure me to Atlantic City after his hired hands blew it here. By then, he’d killed off everyone who could trip him up but Ana and me. A handful of unsolved murders in Washington is a little blip on the screen, so nobody noticed they were related.”
Cross positioned his chin on a steeple of his fingers. “When you told him the FBI had the stuff from Magliacci’s safe-deposit box…that was the feather that brought the bridge down.”
“The DNA. Nothing else phased him. I tried to convince him to turn himself in, but…”
Cross shook his head. “Proud man, Austin. Self-destruction was easier.”
Warfield nodded. Maybe Quinn never really allowed himself to think about it before. Faced with certain exposure, it all came home. In those few minutes, he morphed from homicidal to suicidal.
Cross had been staring out the window into the Rose Garden. He turned back to Warfield. “Anything else right now, Cam? Guess I need to sit with this for awhile.”
“Nothing that can’t wait, sir.” What Warfield needed was sleep. He’d been up since Friday morning.
Next morning in the Oval Office, Cross brought Warfield up to date on Quinn. Emergency surgery had kept him alive so far, but more operations would be necessary. He’d be moved to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore as soon as the doctors would allow it. Even if he survived, he was not expected to recover his mental faculties.
“So he’ll never stand trial,” said Cross. “In a way, this is worse for him than a trial. This whole damn mess, it’s the hardest thing I’ve had to face here in the presidency. Anywhere.”
Warfield nodded.
“Now I have to deal with the press,” Cross said. “It’ll look worse if we try to keep it quiet much longer. Congress will jump in the middle of it. CIA may as well put their operations files on all the billboards around town when Congress gets through wringing them out.”
After a while, Cross looked at Warfield in resignation. “Anything else?”
“This may not be the best time.”
“What is it?”
“Ana Koronis. She’s gotta be dealt with.” After Damn Right Donaldson delivered Warfield and Quinn to the hospital, his men took Ana to Philadelphia where they held her until federal marshals returned her to the ADC.
“This Helen Swope thing?”
“Right. Take what we know about Quinn, Swope’s apparent false testimony plus what Suri told me, you get some serious doubt about Ana’s guilt.”
“She’ll get a new trial after Quinn has been dealt with, when all his doings have been fleshed out. And she can use those facts for her defense.”
Warfield nodded. “If Ana’s innocent, and I think she probably is, she shouldn’t have to wait around for the system to work, knowing what we know. You’re talking a year, maybe more. Swope’s dead, but at least Joe Morgan survived, and her minister is going to make it.”