SIX WEEKS LATER

Quinn sat on the beach, watching the waves slosh over the weathered gravel. He was sitting on the sand above the tideline, far enough up that his clothes wouldn't get wet. The weather wasn't exactly warm, in fact, it was on the cool side that day, cloudy and misty, especially close to the water, as he was. But he was now able to lean back on his hands, and put his full weight on his arms. His shoulders were healing up. The ocean smelled good to him, even the fishy overtones he got when the wind shifted south. Seagulls squawked overhead, and hazarded the waves to get at small tidbits that turned up on the beach. The pickings were better around the dumpsters. One bird eyed him warily from atop a nearby covered trash can. He almost smiled back at the gull. Why not? He was alive.

His limp had been more pronounced for a while, but that was starting to level off a bit, too. In the last few days, he'd started to take walks. Gerhardt had to split on another job, and he'd been gone a month. But before he left the state, he hooked Quinn up with his critical medication, and introduced another semi-retired covert operative who lived in the region. She made a pass through the cottage every week. She spoke a few brief lines in German, inspected his wounds, dropped a bag of groceries, and left.

Guilford. He was in Guilford, Connecticut. He hadn't been here before, but it was a cookie-cutter match for many other New England small towns, with quaint shops, restaurants, and a public pebble beach where he now sat. The utility of the house's location in this town puzzled him.

"Why here? What the hell is in Guilford?" he'd asked the visiting German operative one day. She'd finished re-bandaging his exit wound and dropped the used bandages in the trash. Lighting a Pall Mall, she regarded Quinn silently for a moment, streaming smoke into the room from pursed lips.

"Exactly," she'd replied. Alright, then, he'd thought to himself. This safe house is safe because it's in the middle of buttfuck, nowhere. Fine. He'd fallen back to sleep after that, and hadn't heard her leave.

That was during week two, after he could sit up on his own. He had spent almost ten days unconscious, but after recovering somewhat from blood loss, he'd eased off the morphine and done a bit of snooping around. The two-bedroom clapboard saltbox they'd put him up in was plain and cozy, with few items that appeared personal in the bedroom, and the odd vase and framed painting or photo that made the place look lived-in, like a weekend escape for a supposedly absent city dweller. It was also tiny – he'd stayed in bigger apartments, even in his salad days. But it was adequate. It was clean, quiet, and the hot water worked. He'd sifted through the cabinets, found basic foodstuffs and a freezer full of Lean Cuisine. He'd frowned down at them, and resolved to nuke two or even three at a time. He'd been pretty thin on the cuisine lately anyway, and certainly didn't need to be more lean. After his injury, beating, institutional time, and the recent shooting, he was down to 165 pounds. Some of that was fluid, but not all.

As he needed less morphine, his appetite increased. Five weeks after the shooting, he was feeling pretty limber. Gerhardt's antibiotics had prevented infection, and the unlisted sawbones they'd had come in and make sure his bullet wounds were cleaned out had done a good job.

Quinn sat down in the tiny living room with his food every night. He'd tried listening again to the radio shows he'd followed at Carrie's house. But for some reason, something about that guy, O'Keefe, now made his skin crawl. He'd listened for a minute, but then snapped the radio off again. He was still hazy about what day of the week it was, but he could identify emotion in people's voices. He didn't know how he hadn't noticed it before – that dude, Brett O'Keefe, was crazy. Maybe crazy like a fox. But there was an undertone of batshit that he didn't care for at all, didn't want polluting his brain anymore. He was just like that Alex… someone. Quinn couldn't retrieve the name. Infowars. Both shows were a total mind-fuck.

Quinn leaned back on the couch, and finished gobbling his rice and beans. Right before he'd gotten angry and turned the radio off, he'd heard O'Keefe babble some crazy shit that had stuck with him. Or maybe he'd heard it back with that girl… Clarice, the one he'd … well, or maybe he'd heard it at Carrie's house. It was O'Keefe's voice, though, and it stuck in his memory.

"They tell us what to do, what to think…. These motherfuckers are killing us…" and then later, "…if you feel it - this calling to be an independent American - the time to rise up is now. Now!"

Yeah, exactly, Quinn thought. He belched. Time for a little independence, away from your stream of asshat propaganda.

He felt more in control of his thoughts lately. Some of it was weaning off the morphine which, to be honest, he had used judiciously until he'd run out. But he wasn't in pain anymore. He wondered a lot of his problems with fuzzy thinking and memory, and even with slurred speech hadn't been because of the Ativan.

The way he'd used alcohol to dull stress, he'd gotten himself in a tight spot with physical withdrawal more than once. He'd had the VA doctors prescribe Ativan for the times he'd had nightmares, and used it when he'd been sick after a week or two of binge drinking. But since his most recent bullet wound, he hadn't drunk alcohol at all. He'd felt too sick to even think of it, and later when he did think of it, he had no car to get around. The salt-and-pepper haired troll that brought his groceries never suggested booze, and Gerhardt's last care package had only contained his anti-seizure meds, and one antidepressant. He took the Zoloft and the Lamictal. But no booze meant no drying-out, and no drying out meant no rebound anxiety. And thus, no Ativan. It made sense, and though he hadn't meant to do a cleanse up here, it appeared that he had. His mind, his thinking and memory were more clear every day.

He'd punched buttons until another radio station came up, WNPR, out of Meridian, it said. That was better. He listened to news about President Keene, the latest protests in DC and New York, the fallout from the assassination madness and the attempted coup. Then, a story about higher-ups at the C.I.A. being arrested en masse.

With his stomach full, he had been dozing off, but that news story brought him around quickly. He'd turned on the TV and flipped channels until he found MSNBC. Same story. A few familiar faces in were brought on, the classic perp walk in handcuffs, and later there was a still shot of Dar Adal, who evidently wasn't doing the walk of shame because he was already in a holding cell. Jesus fucking Christ.

He sat back down hard, and an "oof" of dismay escaped his lips as he listened to the newscaster describe the previous night's events. He thought to himself again what a close shave he'd just had. He could have – maybe, should have - been dead. Maybe all these guys were in on it. It was certainly possible. He knew Dar could have turned his back on him, if it was to his advantage. He should have shot the fucker when he had the chance. He hadn't seen Saul on TV, but he wondered if he was in custody as well.

And then, he thought of Carrie. He'd tried not to think of her at all for a while, and to his surprise, had done pretty well at it. At the flag house, she'd tried to say she cared, in some oblique way. Her eyes had filled, and for a moment, Quinn felt a stab of pity. He guessed she did care. But he'd stayed around and waited for so long. Waiting for her. He'd tried acting interested. He'd tried acting indifferent. He'd disappeared for two and a half years, then gone right back to risking his life for her. He'd written her a letter - he still wondered what happened to it. And now, after Berlin, the New York incident, and everything else, she was still off on her own, still being Carrie. Still working for her country. Country first. And still looking in the mirror to see how she was being perceived, he guessed. He had to admit it to himself. He admired her drive, and he would always love her. But she was selfish.

He pushed the memories away, but felt a twinge when he thought about Franny. It had been nice to be around a child. She was a sweet girl. And he thought briefly, painfully, about little Johnny. Almost ten years old now, not a little boy any more. Was he playing little league baseball now? On the swim team? Learning guitar? Julia was a good mother, and he knew Johhny would have the things he'd never had himself. Stability, love, home support. But his role? That ship had sailed.

He looked again at the images on TV, and caught a glimpse of a woman in a gray pantsuit with shoulder-length blond hair, flanking the President. He couldn't see the woman's face, because there was a guy walking along, positioned in such a way that he blocked her face from the camera. Presumably, that man was the new chief of staff. Quinn didn't recognize him. But the woman's hip, the hair, the stride, the way of swinging her arms – that was Carrie for sure. With the President. Moving on. He turned the TV off, and got his coat.

That had been the first of his daily walks. He'd walked down the residential streets, slowly at first. He didn't want to attract attention, or make anyone think he was a vagrant. He kept moving. His hair was still long, but he'd pulled it back in a tail and put a cap over it. He'd dug through the dresser drawers until he'd found a decent shirt that fit, the L.L. Bean tag still attached to the sleeve. It was an XL, so it fit him in the shoulders, but the midsection flapped on his skinny frame like a sack. Quinn tucked it in. When he managed the all the buttons on the plaid flannel himself, he'd slipped boots on and looked in the mirror. Almost human, he thought to himself.

In the neighborhood, on the cracked sidewalks, he'd taken some time to get around, and look at the homes and yards. He watched kids crossing the street after school, backpacks and trombone cases in hand. He'd seen moms and nannies pushing strollers and leading whiny pre-schoolers towards what he presumed was the beach. Walking down Whitfield Avenue, he'd seen a school group on foot, two by two and flanked by teachers in bright red t-shirts. He followed them to a broad lawn behing a low wall, and a stone house he'd not seen before. He walked up to a brown historical marker in the yard, and looked at the compact stone cabin with its very sharp roof. It looked straight out of Harry Potter. He didn't follow the school group, but went around the outside of the yard was clear, the trees tall and very old. The home had been built in 1639.

Quinn wasn't a visitor-center kind of guy, so after he'd satisfied himself with the view of the old house outside, he left the clamor of touring children and headed down the lane, past the low stone wall, and toward the beach, where he could hear the ocean surf. He found a comfortable spot to rest, and after that day, he'd come again and again, sitting for an hour or two at a time, just to think.

There was something about that old house. It stayed with him. He'd read a little of what was available on the outside of the historic structure. Long ago, so long that there had hardly been any white people on the continent at all, someone had the faith to come. Start a new family – the home's original builder, Henry Whitfield, had nine children. They'd left everything they'd known, and crossed the ocean. They brought the best of their own world with them – their religion, their language. Their traditions. And they'd left the old shit, the persecution, behind. In this new world, knowing no one, with no technology, they'd begun again, with the outcome unknown. All they had were their firearms, their bible, and a stone wall that the other locals used like a fort, in times of attack. He wasn't down with the way people had eventually oppressed the native population, but the original pioneers had been far too outnumbered to be anything other than scared shitless. It really took balls. They couldn't have foreseen the outcome – they all could easily have died. Themselves, and their children. A massacre or a famine, or some disease - they wouldn't have even left a mark, except maybe a stacked stone foundation, overgrown with ferns, and shadowed in mystery.

Every day on his walk, Quinn's feet took him past the old stone house, and his mind reviewed risk and reward. He thought about Carrie, about Max, about Saul and the agency. His past - what little he had of a childhood - and his hard-charging adulthood, up until the gas attack and the stroke. And for the first time, he considered his solitary future. He thought about the years he'd waited, and the number of times he'd hoped Carrie would notice his silent, devoted love. He thought about waiting longer, and going back to New York.

There had been a great deal of waiting in his life. He was 40 years old. As he sat staring out at the ocean, trying to focus on the vanishing point in the distance, it hit him that he wasn't getting any of that time back. Standing up on the beach, he swept the sand off his seat, and threw the end of a bag of potato chips to the seagulls, carefully depositing the empty sack in a waste can. He walked slowly back towards the safe house, his head down, his limp less pronounced, his shoulders squared.

He stopped in front of the memorial statue of Henry Whitfield on the way back to the cottage. If there was time left for him to pioneer anything, then he'd have to start on that voyage soon. Risk and reward. He was sure that the Whitfields had left people and places behind that they would miss – but he also suspected they found new places and people to love, right here. Or they wouldn't have stayed and thrived.

"Right, Henry?" Quinn asked the statue out loud. Then, suddenly becoming conscious that it might be a little crazy to be seen talking out loud to a statue, he turned his cap back towards the ground and hustled back to the safe house. He had some packing to do.