The Sixth Man (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 5)

“When you have nothing to lose, it doesn’t take that much guts,” replied Roy. “And it doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.”

CHAPTER

77

ELLEN FOSTER SAT at her chair in the bunker underneath DHS headquarters. Above her thousands of public servants went about their tasks of keeping the country safe from all attacks. Normally, Foster would be intimately involved in the strategy that went into this everyday battle. She lived and breathed it, thought of little else outside of it.

Right now she couldn’t have cared less about it.

James Harkes stood across from her at semi-attention.

She had confided in him what Kelly Paul had told her in that bathroom at Lincoln Center. He had asked a few relevant questions but remained mostly silent. She gazed up at him with the look of a person assessing her last, best hope.

“This changes everything. What can we do?” she asked.

“What do you want to achieve?”

“I want to survive, Harkes—isn’t that rather obvious?” she snapped.

“But there are many ways to survive, Madame Secretary. I just need to know which one you want to pursue.”

She blinked and saw what he meant. “I want to survive with my career intact, as though nothing had happened. That’s as plain as I can state it.”

He nodded slowly. “That will be very hard to do,” he said frankly.

Foster gave a little shiver and wrapped her arms around herself. “But not impossible?”

“No, not impossible.”

“Quantrell is trying to work a deal, rat me out, Kelly Paul said.”

“I wouldn’t doubt that, knowing what sort of person he is. But he has limited access to the people who matter. You don’t.”

“But the problem is I’ve already been to the president and built the case against Bunting. The president told me to take care of it. He gave me explicit authority to do whatever was necessary.”

“And to go back to him now with a new story about Quantrell would really make you lose credibility in the president’s eyes?”

“Exactly. I’ll be like the little boy who cried wolf once too often.”

“You may have answered your problem with what you’ve already said.”

She glanced sharply at him. “What do you mean?”

“The president gave you explicit authority to do what was necessary.”

“But Quantrell?”

“Collateral damage. And it’s not as difficult as it sounds. With Quantrell out of the way, your problems are solved. You have left nothing incriminating on the table. He goes, the road ahead is clear.”

Foster sat there thinking about this. “It might work. But how will the collateral damage thing work?’

“We’ve blamed everything else on Bunting, why not this too? It’s natural enough. They’re bitter rivals. Everyone knows that. The evidence of Bunting’s obsession with Quantrell will be easy enough to produce.”

“So we take out Quantrell and frame Bunting for it?”

“Yes.”

“But Kelly Paul said he was long gone.”