"And it's coming soon," Faust said.
Kaminski nodded.
"Days away," she said.
She lowered the gun.
"Forty notes," Faust said. "Forty letters between A and G. It's not enough."
"Add in the Mozart cadenza," Kaminski said. "That's bullshit too."
Middleton said, "Mozart didn't write cadenzas."
Kaminski nodded. "Exactly. He didn't write twenty-eight piano concertos, either. The cadenza is part of the message. Same board, same game."
Faust asked, "Which first?"
"Mozart. He was before Chopin."
"Then how many notes?"
"The two things together, a couple hundred in total, maybe."
"Still not enough. And you can't spell stuff out using only A through G. Especially not in German."
"There are sharps and flats. The Mozart is in D-minor."
"You can't sharpen and flatten letters of the alphabet."
"Numbers," Middleton said. "It's not letters of the alphabet. It's numbers."
"One for A, two for B? That's still not enough. This thing is complex."
"Not one for A," Middleton said. "Concert pitch. The A above middle C is 440 cycles per second. Each note has a specific frequency. Sharps and flats, equally. A couple hundred notes would yield eighty-thousand digits. Like a bar code. Eighty-thousand digits would yield all the information you want."
Faust asked, "How do we work it out?"
"With a calculator," Middleton said. "On the treble stave the second space up is the A above middle C. That's 440 cycles. An octave higher is the first overtone, or the second harmonic, 880 cycles. An octave lower is 220 cycles. We can work out the intervals in between. We'll probably get a bunch of decimal places, which is even better. The more digits, the more information."
Faust nodded. Nothing in his face. He retrieved the Mozart manuscript from the credenza and butted it together with the smeared page in the glassine envelope. Clamped the stack under his arm and nodded to Nacho. Then he looked at Kaminski and Middleton and suddenly leapt forward, ripping the silenced Glock from her hand.
He said, "I wasn't entirely honest before. I didn't hire Vukasin. We were both hired by someone else. For the same purpose. Which isn't entirely benevolent, I'm afraid. We have ricin, and everything else we need. But we couldn't stabilize the mixture. Now we can, thanks to your keen insights. For which we thank you. We'll express our thanks practically--with mercy. Exactly ten minutes from now, when I'm safely away, Nacho will shoot you both in the head. Fast and painless, I promise."
The gun in Nacho's hand came up and rested level, steady as a rock. He was back in his chair, solidly between Middleton and the door. Kaminski gasped and caught Middleton's arm. Faust smiled once, and his blue eyes twinkled, and he let himself out.
Ten minutes. A long time, or a short time, depending on the circumstances. Ten minutes in a line at the post office seems like an eternity. The last 10 minutes of your life seems like a blink of an eye. Nacho didn't move a muscle. He was like a statue, except that the muzzle of his gun moved to track every millimetric move that Middleton or Kaminski made, and except that about once every 90 seconds he glanced at his watch.
He took his final look at the time and raised his gun a little higher. Head height, not gut height. His finger whitened on the trigger.
Then the door opened.
Jack Perez stepped into the room.
Nacho turned toward him. Said, "What--"
Perez raised his gun and shot Nacho in the face. No silencer. The noise was catastrophic. They left by the fire stairs, in a big hurry.
Ten minutes later they were in an Inner Harbor diner and Perez was saying, "So basically you told him everything?"
Kaminski nodded her head very ruefully and said, "Yes."
Middleton shook his head very definitively and said, "No."
"So which is it?" Perez said. "Yes or no?"
"No," Middleton said. "But only inadvertently. I made a couple of mistakes. I guess I wasn't thinking too straight."
"What mistakes?"
"Concert pitch is a fairly recent convention. Like international time zones. The idea that the A above middle C should be tuned to 440 cycles started way after both Mozart and Chopin were around. Back in the day the tunings across Europe varied a lot, and not just from country to country or time to time. Pitch could vary even within the same city. The pitch used for an English cathedral organ in the 1600s could be as much as five semitones lower than the harpsichord in the bishop's house next door. The variations could be huge. There's a pitch pipe from 1720 that plays the A above middle C at 380 cycles, and Bach's organs in Germany played A at 480 cycles. The A on the pitch pipe would have been an F on the organs. We've got a couple of Handel's tuning forks, too. One plays A at 422 cycles and the other at 409."
Perez said, "So?"
"So Faust's calculations will most likely come out meaningless."
"Unless?"
"Unless he figures out a valid base number for A."
"Which would be what?"
"428 would be my guess. Plausible for the period, and the clue is right there in the Mozart. The 28th piano concerto, which he never got to. The message was hidden in the cadenza. If the 28 wasn't supposed to mean something in itself, they could have written a bogus cadenza into any of the first twenty-seven real concertos."
"Faust will figure that out. When all else fails. He's got the Mozart manuscript."
"Even so," Middleton said. He turned to Kaminski. "Your uncle would have been ashamed of me. I didn't account for the tempering. He would have. He was a great piano tuner."
Perez asked, "What the hell is tempering?"
Middleton said, "Music isn't math. If you start with A at 440 cycles and move upward at intervals that the math tells you are correct, you'll be out of tune within an octave. You have to nudge and fudge along the way. By ear. You have to do what your ear tells you is right, even if the numbers say you're wrong. Bach understood. That's what The Well-Tempered Klavier is all about. He had his own scheme. His original title page had a handwritten drawing on it. It was assumed for centuries that it was just decoration, a doodle really, but now people think it was a diagram about how to temper a keyboard so it sounds perfect."
Perez took out a pen and did a rapid calculation on a napkin. "So what are you saying? If A is 440, B isn't 495?"
"Not exactly, no."
"So what is it?"
"493, maybe."
"Who would know? A piano tuner?"
"A piano tuner would feel it. He wouldn't know it."
"So how did these Nazi chemists encode it?"
"With a well-tuned piano, and a microphone, and an oscilloscope."
"Is that the only way?"
"Not now. Now it's much easier. You could head down to Radio Shack and buy a digital keyboard and a MIDI interface. You could tune the keyboard down to A equals 428, and play scales, and read the numbers right off the LED window."
Perez nodded.
And sat back.
And smiled.
16
JEFFERY DEAVER
"No leads." Emmett Kalmbach and Dick Chambers were supervising the search of the suite at the Harbor Court, which had been rented by Faust under a fake name. Naturally, Middleton reflected sourly, cell phone at his ear; the man was a master of covering his tracks.
"Nothing?" he asked, shaking his head to Felicia Kaminski and Jack Perez, who sat across from him in the diner.
"Nope. We've gone over the entire place," Kalmbach said. "And searched Vukasin's body. And some bastard with a weird tattoo. Name is Stefan Andrzej. Oh, and that Mexican your son-in-law took out. But not a goddamn clue where Faust might've gone."
"The binoculars Felicia told us about?" Kaminski had explained about Nacho's game of I-spy out the window, and the bits of conversation that had to do with deliveries and technical information. "They were focused on a warehouse across the street but it was empty."
"So he's taken the c
hemicals someplace else."
"And we don't have a fucking clue where," the FBI agent muttered. "We'll keep looking. I'll get back to you, Harry."
The line went dead.
"No luck," Middleton muttered. He sipped coffee and finished a candy bar. He told himself it was for the energy; in fact, he mostly needed the comfort of the chocolate. "At least I gave Faust the wrong information about the code in the music. He can only get so far with the gas."
"But with trial and error," Kaminski asked, "he could he come up with the right formula?"
"Yeah, he could. And a lot of people'll die--and the deaths'd be real unpleasant."
They sat silently for a moment then he glanced at Perez. "You looked pretty comfortable with that Beretta." As he had with the Colt when he took down Eleana Soberski.
His son in law laughed. "I stayed clear of the family business in Loseiana. "But that doesn't mean I wasn't aware of the family business." A coy smile. "But you know that, right?"
Middleton shrugged. "I ran a check on you, sure. You were marrying my daughter . . . If there'd been a spec of dirt in your closet, Charley wouldn't have a hyphenated name right now."
"I respect looking out for kin, Harry. I'll be the same way with my . . . " His voice faded and he looked down, thinking, of course, of the child they'd almost had. Middleton touched his arm, squeezed.
Kaminski asked, "My uncle knew you as a musicologist, uno professore. But you are much more than that, aren't you?"
"Yes. Well, I was. I worked for the army and the government. Then I had a group that tracked down war criminals."
"Like the man who killed my uncle?"
"Yes."
"You said 'had.' What happened?"
"The group broke up."
"Why?" Perez asked.
Middleton decided to share the story with them. "There was an incident in Africa. The four of us tracked down a warlord in Darfur. He'd been stealing AIDS drugs from the locals and selling children as soldiers. We did an extraordinary rendition--lured him to international waters and were going to fly him back to The Hague for trial. Then our main witnesses against him all died quote accidentally in a fire. They were in a safe house. The doors were locked and it burned. Most of them had their families with them. Twenty children died. Without the witnesses there was no trial. We had to let him go. I was going to head back to Darfur and make a case against him for the fire but Val--Valentin Brocco--lost it. He heard the man smirking about how he'd beaten us. Val pulled him out back and shot him in the head.
"I couldn't keep going after that. I disbanded the group. You've got to play by the rules. If you don't, their side wins. We're no better than they are."
"It looks like it bothered you very much," Kaminski said.
"They were my friends. It was hard."
And one of them was much more than just a friend. But this was part of the story Middleton didn't share.
His phone beeped. He glanced at the screen and read the lengthy SMS message. "Speak of the devil . . . It's Lespasse and Nora," he explained. "This is interesting . . . They talked to one of our old contacts. He found out that machinery that could be used to make a bio-weapon delivery systems was shipped to a factory in downtown Baltimore yesterday." He looked up. "I've got an address. I think I'll go check it out." He said to Perez, "You take Felicia someplace safe and--"
The man shook his head. "I'm going with you."
"It's not your fight, Jack."
"These are terrorists. It's everybody's fight. I'm with you."
"You sure about that?"
"You're not going anywhere without me."
Middleton gave him an affectionate nod. He then subtly pulled his service Glock from his waistband and, holding the gun under the table, checked the ammunition. "I'm short a few rounds. Let me see your Beretta."
Perez slipped him the weapon, out of sight.
Middleton looked over the clip. "You've got twelve and one in the hole. I'm going to borrow three or four."
"Ah, you don't have to pay me back," his son-in-law said, grim-faced. Then smiled. "Give 'em to Faust instead."
Middleton laughed.
They left the diner and walked Kaminski to a hotel up the street. Middleton gave her some money and told her to check in and stay out of sight until they called.
"I want to go," she protested.
"No, Felicia."
"My uncle's dead because of this man."
He smiled at her. "This isn't your line of work. Leave it to the experts."
Reluctantly she nodded and turned toward the hotel lobby.
Middleton climbed into the driver's seat of Perez's car and together the men sped over streets that grew progressively rougher as cobblestones showed through the worn asphalt.
He said, "The delivery was to Four Thirty Eight West Ellicott Street. It's about a mile from here." Middleton then glanced to his right. Perez was shaking his head, smiling.
The father-in-law squinted in curiosity. "What?"
"Funny. You and your friends."
"Who? Lespasse and Nora?"
"Yeah."
"What about them?"
The voice was now sharp with sarcasm. "Supposed to be so fuckin' good at your job. And here you are, chasing down a bum lead."
"What're you talking about?"
The Beretta appeared fast. Middleton flinched as he felt the muzzle against his neck. His son-in-law took the Glock, tossed it in the back, along with Middleton's cell phone. Then he undid his father-in-law's seatbelt, but kept his own hooked.
"What's going on?" Middleton gasped.
"The gas delivery system was shipped to Virginia, not Baltimore. We drove it up. Whatever's on Ellicott Street, it doesn't have anything to do with us."
"Us?" Middleton whispered. "You're with them, Jack?"
"'fraid so, Dad. Turn right here. Head to the waterfront."
"But--"
The black automatic prodding Middleton's ear. "Now."
He did as he was told, following directions to a deserted pier, lined with old warehouses. Perez ordered him to stop. The pistol never wavering, he directed Middleton out of the car and pushed him through an old doorway.
Faust glanced up as if they were guests right on time for a party. In overalls, wearing thick gloves, he was standing at a cluttered worktable littered with tools, tubing and electronic or computer parts. A pallet of gas tanks was nearby. There were 50 or so of them. "Danger--Biohazard" was printed on them in six languages.
Faust gave a fast appraisal of Middleton. "Search him."
"I already--"
"Search him."
Perez patted him down. "Clean."
Middleton shook his head. "I don't get it . . . Jack shot Nacho."
Faust grimaced. "We had to sacrifice the greasy little prick--so you'd believe Mr. Perez here and give us the real musical code. I doubted you'd be honest with me back there."
"He wasn't," Perez confirmed. "He claimed he wasn't thinking clearly. But I'm sure he was lying. He told me how it works." He explained what Middleton had said about adjusting the pitch of A and using a simple electronic tuning device to decode the formula.
Faust was nodding. "Hadn't considered that. Of course."
Middleton said, "So Jack coming to our rescue in the Harbor Court was all part of the plan."
"Pretty much."
"What the hell is going on?"
"I'm just a businessman, Colonel. The world of terrorism is different now. Too many watch lists, too much surveillance, too many computers. You have to outsource. I've been hired by people who are patriots, idealists, protecting their culture."
"Is that how you describe ethnic cleansing?"
Faust frowned. "Protecting them from impurity is how they describe it. You meddled in their country. You'll pay for that. A hundred thousand people will pay."
"And you, Jack?" Middleton snapped.
The young man gave a grim laugh. "I have my own ideals. But they've got commas and a decimal point. I'm making ten million t
o keep an eye on you and help them out. Yeah, I went to law school and gave up the family business . . . And it was the worst mistake of my life. Going legit? Bullshit." He gazed at his father-in-law contemptuously. "Look at you, Mr. Harry Middleton . . . The star of military intel, the musical genius . . . Faust led you all over the world like he had you on a leash."
"Jack, we don't have time," Faust said. "I'll try the adjustment to the formula. If it works and we don't need him anymore, you can take care of him."
Middleton said, "Jack, you're willing to kill so many people?"
"I'll donate some of the ten million to a relief fund . . . " A grin. "Or not."
Then he stopped talking. Cocked his head.
Faust was looking up too.
"Helicopter," the younger man muttered.
But Faust spat out, "No, it's two. Wait, three."
Faust ran to the window. "It's a trap. Police. Soldiers." He glared at Jack. "You led them here!"
"No, I did what we agreed."
Middleton could hear diesels of Jeeps and personnel carriers in the distance, closing in fast. Spotlights shone from on high.
Faust slapped his hand on a button on the wall. The warehouse was plunged into darkness. Middleton lunged for Faust but saw the man's vague form run to a corner of the warehouse, open a trap door and vanish. A few seconds later, a powerboat engine started up.
Hell! Middleton thought. He swept the light switch on. He ran to the trap door. Tried it, but Faust had locked it from below.
Sweating, frantic, Perez pointed his gun at Middleton. "Harry, don't move. You're my ticket out of here."
Middleton ignored him and started for the front door of the warehouse.
"Harry!" Perez aimed at Middleton's head. "I'm not telling you again!"
Their eyes met. Perez pulled the trigger.
Click.
Middleton pulled a handful of bullets from his pocket. He displayed them. When pretending to take just three or four bullets from the clip in the diner, he'd taken them all--and the one in the chamber too.
His eyes bored into the younger man's. "That text message I got earlier? It wasn't from Nora and Lespasse. It was from Charley. 'Green Lantern.' It's our code for an emergency. And she text-messaged me who I was in danger from. You, Jack. I knew you'd lead me to Faust. So I text-messaged Lespasse and Nora and told them to follow me from the diner."
Middleton leapt forward and slammed his fist into Perez's jaw, then easily twisted the automatic away. He dropped a round into the chamber, locked the slide, aimed at his son-in-law.