Kaminski stopped, her fingers poised over the keys.
There was something very strange about this cadenza.
The restaurant was almost empty. Two waiters stood at discreet attention just beyond a red curtain. Middleton could see from their faces they wanted to go home.
Yet Faust seemed in no hurry to go anywhere.
"So you never suspected anything about the Chopin?" Faust asked.
Middleton wasn't sure how much to tell him. He still didn't trust the man.
He thought suddenly about his interrupted ride to Baltimore with the two dopers Traci and Marcus. How he had made them listen to a Schoenberg recitatif, and Marcus's crack that it sounded like nothing but wrong notes.
All the easier to hid a message in, he had told Marcus.
How hard could it be then to encrypt a code within the mathematical beauty of Chopin?
"As soon as I saw it, I felt something was wrong with it," Middleton said. "But I just chalked it up to a bad forgery."
"Jedynak didn't say anything?" Faust asked.
Middleton shook his head. "When we were going over all the manuscripts, he seemed very interested in the Chopin in particular. He insisted I take it back to the States for authentication. Even though I told him I was sure it was a fake."
"Maybe he was trying to get it safely out of the country. Maybe he was trying to keep it out of the wrong hands."
"Jedynak knew the VX formula was encrypted in it?"
Faust shrugged.
Middleton sat back in his chair. "So I was supposed to be some fuckin' mule?"
Faust said nothing. Which angered Middleton even more.
"Can I see it?" Faust asked.
When Middleton didn't move, Faust gave him a sad smile. "I told you. I am desperate. I need your help."
Middleton reached down to the briefcase at his feet and pulled out the manuscript. He handed it to Faust across the table.
Faust looked at it for a moment then his dark eyes came back up to Middleton.
"I know chemistry. You know music." He pushed it across the table. "Tell me what you see."
Middleton hesitated then turned the manuscript so he could read it. The paper and ink alone were enough for him to offer Jedynak his initial opinion that it was probably a forgery. A good one, yes, but still a forgery.
But now, he concentrated on the notes themselves. He took his time. The quiet bustle of the waiters clearing the cutlery and linen fell away. He was lost in the music.
He looked up suddenly.
"There's something missing," he said.
"What do you mean?" Faust asked.
Middleton shook his head. "It's probably nothing. This is, after all, just a forgery. But the end of the first movement--a piece of it is missing."
"But you're not sure," Faust asked.
"I wish I had . . . "
"You wish you had another expert eye?"
"Yes," Middleton said.
"I have one for you," Faust said. "Come. Let's go . . . But we go alone. Not with any visitors."
"Who else would go with us?"
Faust smiled and glanced toward the front of the restaurant, where Tesla and Lespasse awaited. "Alone . . . That is one of the immutable terms of the deal."
"I'll follow your lead."
Faust reached forward and tugged on Middleton's tiny wire microphone/ earbud unit. He dropped it on the floor and crushed it. He then paid the bill. "Wait here." He made a phone call from the pay phone near the men's room then returned to the table. No more than five minutes later sirens sounded in the distance, growing closer. The attention of everyone in the restaurant turned immediately to the front windows. Then, in a flurry of lights and horns, police cars and emergency trucks skidded to a stop across the quaint street from the restaurant, in front of a bar. The bomb squad was the centerpiece of the operation.
Middleton had to give Faust credit. Not a single person in the restaurant or outside was focused anywhere but on the police action. They'd discover soon enough it was a false alarm, but the distraction would serve its purpose.
Middleton slipped the Chopin manuscript back into his briefcase and rose to his feet. Faust gestured to the kitchen.
"Through the back. Hurry. Time is short."
This was where Felicia Kaminski was, M. T. Connolly thought, and it was where Middleton and Faust would continue their rendezvous.
Connolly now knew what Middleton had that so many people had deemed valuable enough to kill for: a seemingly priceless manuscript created for pleasure but now corrupted with the possibility of mass murder.
Even sitting alone, outside this hotel, in the dark privacy of her own thoughts, she was a little ashamed to admit she was ignorant of the strange history of this Chopin score, and of the human value of such a find. More so, until tonight, she had been as unaware as most Americans about the tragedies at St. Sophia.
But she did understand a monster's need for glory, no matter how twisted and unimaginable it might be to a sane person. And it was an interesting side note to the events of the last few days. Her colleagues in law enforcement were looking for Middleton because they believed he killed two cops. But, thanks to Josef, her angel in Poland, she knew better. Middleton had in his hands a formula for mass destruction, and though he had formed an alliance with Kalmbach and Chambers, she believed he needed her help to keep it away from Vukasin. Kalmbach and Chambers she did not trust. In the core of her being, she believed the only way to stop a chemical attack within the borders of the United States was to keep Harold Middleton alive.
She took a quick look along the street and checked her watch. There was no sense in going inside the hotel until Middleton and Faust arrived--because it was only then that Vukasin would appear. She had left her previous post inside the restaurant only seconds before Middleton and Faust, sure they would come here to confer with Kaminski, who could help them solve their puzzle.
Now the street was asleep and silent, few lights reflecting life, except in the windows of the Harbor Court Hotel. A white BMW sat under a flickering streetlamp, parked where it could easily be seen. About 100 feet to the south, tucked into the shade of an old oak, was a charcoal sedan, its hood glittering with raindrops, its side windows fogged: Connolly's.
Vukasin was hidden in the generous gray shadows of a nearby building, watching her. He would not move until she did.
Nine minutes later, he was rewarded for his patience. An almost undetectable shift of the undercarriage told him she had readjusted to a more comfortable position. He was certain she had been in the sedan's quiet and security for too long.
Though he rather it had been Middleton or Faust behind the wheel, or even Kaminski, it mattered little who was in the car. It could be an innocent soul waiting for a lover, or a fool sleeping off the last taste of cheap whiskey. A minor distraction, at best. But one that had to be dealt with. He could not afford to be seen.
Vukasin slipped from his invisibility and made his way toward the sedan. He added a stagger to his walk and a slump to his shoulders to simulate the last journey of a drunk's long night.
The sedan jostled again as Vukasin neared it, the occupant coming to life. He could not see inside as he passed, but he heard the faint creak of wet glass moving as the occupant cracked the window a sliver to see who was passing.
He decided to play.
He ambled back to the sedan, arms spread. "Good evening, kind sir, could you spare a few dollars and direct me to the nearest bus line?"
"Go away," Connolly said, her thoughts on Middleton and the manuscript.
Vukasin moved closer. "I am harmless, I assure you," he said.
"Get the fuck out of here. Go."
The window slipped lower, exposing a pale feminine face, her hair brassy and close-cropped. "I'm a cop," she said. "Now get moving."
"So maybe you'd like a drink?" he asked, as he reached into his pocket. "I have a bottle of Russkaya--"
He saw something begin to crystallize in her eyes as he started to wit
hdraw the automatic.
She knows, he thought, with a smile. She knows I'm not American and not a drunk just passing by.
Her eyes widened in complete understanding.
She knew who he was.
And when she saw the metallic glint of the Glock leveled at her head, she knew she was about to die.
He fired, the silenced shot sounding like no more than a small but powerful puff of hot air on the empty street.
15
LEE CHILD
They used the Harbor Court's main street door. Faust led the way to it and pulled it and let Middleton walk through first. Good manners, etiquette, and a clear semaphore signal to the hotel's front-of-house staff: I'm a guest and this guy is with me. A literal embrace, one hand holding the door and the other shepherding Middleton inside. A commonplace dynamic, repeated at the hotel's entrance a thousand times a day. The staff looked up, understood, glanced away.
Vukasin didn't glance away. From 40 yards his gaze followed both men to the elevator bank.
The elevator was smooth but slow, tuned for a low-rise building. Faust got out first, because Middleton wouldn't know which way to turn. Faust held his arms at a right angle, like a traffic cop, blocking right, pointing left. Middleton walked ahead. Thick carpet, quiet air. The muffled sound of a piano. A bright tone and a fast, light action. A Yamaha or a Kawai, Middleton thought. A grand, but not a European heavyweight. A Japanese baby, cross-strung. Light in the bass, tinkly in the treble. A D-minor obbligato was being played confidently with the left hand, and a hesitant melody was being played with the right, in the style of Mozart. But not Mozart, Middleton thought. Certainly no Mozart he had ever heard before. Sight-read, which might explain the hesitancy. Perhaps a pastiche. Or an academic illustration, to demonstrate the standard musicological theory that Mozart bridged the gap between the classical composers and the romantics. The melody seemed to be saying: See? We start with Bach, and 200 years later we get to Beethoven.
The sound got louder but no clearer as they walked. Faust eased ahead and repeated his traffic-cop routine outside a door, blocking the corridor, corralling Middleton to a stop. Faust took a key card from his pocket. It bottomed in the slot, a red light turned green, and the mechanism clicked.
Faust said, "After you."
Middleton turned the handle before the light clicked red again. Bright piano sound washed out at him. The melody again, started over from the top, played this time with confidence, its architecture now fully diagrammed, its structure understood.
But still not Mozart.
Middleton stepped inside and saw a suite, luxurious but not traditional. A lean, bearded man in a chair by the door, with a gun in his hand. His nickname, it turned out, was Nacho. A Yamaha baby grand, with a girl at the keyboard. Manuscript pages laid out left-to-right in front of her on the piano's lid. The girl was thin. She had dark hair and a pinched Eastern European face full of a thousand sorrows. The manuscript looked to be a handwritten original. Old foxed paper, untidy notations, faded ink.
The girl stopped playing. Middleton's mind filled in what would come next, automatically, to the end of the phrase. Faust stepped in behind Middleton and closed the door. The room went quiet. Faust ignored the man in the chair. He walked straight to the piano and gathered the manuscript pages and butted them together and left them in a tidy pile on a credenza. Then he stepped back and closed the lid on the piano's keyboard, gently, giving the girl time to remove her fingers. He said, "Time for business. We have a Chopin manuscript."
"Forged and faked," Middleton said.
"Indeed," Faust said. "And missing a page, I think. Would you agree?"
Middleton nodded. "The end of the first movement. Possibly not a whole page. Maybe just sixteen bars or less."
"How many notes?"
"That's an impossible question. It's a concerto. A dozen instruments, sixteen bars, there could be hundreds of notes."
"The solo instrument," Faust said. "The theme. Ignore the rest. How many notes?"
Middleton shrugged. "Forty, maybe? A statement, a restatement, a resolution. But it's still an impossible question. It isn't Chopin. It's somebody pretending to be Chopin."
Faust said, "I think that helps us. We have to secondguess a secondguesser. It's about what's plausible."
"We can't compose the end of something that didn't exist in the first place."
Faust opened his jacket and took a folded glassine envelope from the inside pocket. Unfolded it and smoothed it. Behind the milky acetate was a single sheet of paper. It had been torn out of a reporter's note pad. It was speckled with dried brown bloodstains. Small droplets. Not arterial spray. Just the kind of spatter that comes from small knife wounds, or heavy blows to a face. Under the stains the paper had been ruled by hand into music staves. Five lines, four spaces, repeated four times. A treble clef. E-G-B-D-F. Every Good Boy Deserves Favor. A 4/4 time signature. Sixteen measures. A melody, sketched in with deft untidy strokes of a pen.
Faust laid the page in front of the girl, on the piano's lid, where the Mozart had been. He said, "Suppose someone who had seen the missing page was asked to reproduce what had been there."
The girl looked at the spatters of blood and said, "Asked?"
Faust said, "Required, then."
The girl said, "My uncle wrote this."
"You can tell?"
"It's handwritten. Handwriting is handwriting, whether it's words or musical notes."
Middleton said, "Your uncle?"
Faust said, "This is Felicia Kaminski. Temporarily going as Joanna Phelps, but she's Henryk Jedynak's niece. Or, she was." Then he pointed at Middleton and addressed the girl and said, "And this is Colonel Harold Middleton. He saw your uncle in Warsaw. Your uncle was a brave man. He stole a page. He knew what was at stake. But he didn't get away with it."
"Who did this to him?"
"We'll get to that. First we need to know if he put the truth on paper."
Faust took out the rest of the first-movement manuscript and handed it to the girl. She spread it out in sequence. She followed the melody with her finger, humming silently. She raised the piano's lid again and picked out phrases on the keys, haltingly. She jumped to the bloodstained page and continued. Middleton nodded to himself. He heard continuity, logic, sense.
Until the last measure.
The last measure was where the movement should have come home to rest, with a whole note that settled back to the root of the native key, with calm and implacable inevitability. But it didn't. Instead it hung suspended in midair with an absurd discordant trill, sixteenth notes battling it out through the whole of the bar, a dense black mess on the page, a harsh beating pulse in the room.
The girl said, "The last bar can't be right."
Faust said, "Apparently."
The girl played the trill again, faster. Said, "OK, now I see."
"See what?"
"The two notes are discordant. Play them fast enough, and the inter-modulation between them implies a third note that isn't actually there. But you can kind of hear it. And it's the right note. It would be very obvious on a violin."
Middleton said, "Chopin didn't write like that."
The girl said, "I know."
Faust asked, "What's the implied note?"
The girl played the trill for half a bar and then stabbed a key in between and a pure tone rang out, sweet and correct and reassuring. She said, "Two notes."
Faust said, "Sounds like one to me."
"The last note of this movement and the first of the next. That's Chopin. Who did this to my uncle?"
Faust didn't answer, because right then the door opened and Vukasin walked in. He had a silenced Glock held down by his thigh and from six feet away Middleton could smell that it had been used, and recently. Faust said, "We're all here." He made the formal introductions, one to the other, Vukasin, Middleton, Nacho, Kaminski. He let his gaze rest on Kaminski and said, "Colonel Middleton killed your uncle. He tortured that page out of him and then cut his t
hroat. In Warsaw, after their lunch."
"Not true," Middleton said.
"True," Vukasin said. "I saw him leave. I went in and found the body. Three bodies. Two bystanders got in the way, apparently."
Faust stepped aside as Nacho took Middleton's arms and pinned him. Vukasin raised the silenced Glock and pointed it at Middleton's face. Then Vukasin lowered the gun again and reversed it in his hand and offered it butt-first to the girl. Said, "Your uncle. Your job, if you want it."
The girl got up off the piano stool and stepped around the end of the keyboard and came forward. Took the gun from Vukasin, who said, "It's ready to go. No safety on a Glock. Just point and shoot, like a cheap camera. There won't be much noise."
Then he stood off to her left. She raised the gun and aimed it where he had aimed it, at the bridge of Middleton's nose. The muzzle wavered a little, in small jerky circles. With the sound suppressor it was a long and heavy weapon.
Middleton said, "They're lying."
The girl nodded.
"I know," she said.
She turned to her left, twisting from the waist, and shot Vukasin in the face. He had been right. There wasn't much noise. Just a bang like a heavy book being slammed on a table, and a wet crunch as the bullet hit home, and the soft tumble of a body falling on thick carpet. Then nothing, just the stink of gunpowder and pooling blood.
The girl twisted back, and lined up on Faust.
"Middleton understands music," she said. "I can see that from here. He wouldn't need to torture that melody out of anyone. It was predictable. Like night follows day."
Faust said, "I didn't know."
"The two discordant notes," the girl said. "Making a phantom third. My uncle always called it a wolf tone. And Vukasin means wolf, in Polish. It was a coded message. He was naming his killer."
"I didn't know," Faust said again. "I swear."
"Talk."
"I hired Vukasin. Someone else must have gotten to him. Hired him out from under me. He was double crossing me."
"Who?"
"I don't know. I swear. And we can't waste time on this. The music holds more code than who killed your uncle."
"He's right, Felicia," Middleton said. "First things first. It's about nerve gas. It could make 9/11 look like a day at the beach."