She called the Human Rights Observer from a payphone in Herald Square. An intern answered and told her Val Brocco hadn’t come in. A flu, she reported; his message said he intended to spend a second day in bed. Tesla decided against giving her name and demanding his latest cell number, consoling herself with the thought that Brocco’s bordering-on-obsessive sense of precaution might serve him well. It’d better: To find Middleton, they’d tried to kill her, sending an agent to Namibia for the task. No doubt then already had at least one agent in metro D.C., where Middleton and Brocco were based.
Next, from the lobby of Madison Square Garden, she tried Jean-Marc Lespasse in Parkwood, North Carolina. Mr. Lespasse, she was told, was no longer with TDD — Technologie de Demain, the company he founded. And, no, the receptionist added tersely, there’s no forwarding information. Sure enough, the last cell number Tesla had for Lespasse was no longer active.
Downstairs into Penn Station, Tesla paid cash for a one-way ticket on the Acela Express to Washington’s Union Station, though she planned to get off in Delaware. Checking the overhead Departure board, she saw she had enough time to run to the newsstand for a pre-paid cell phone and an array of domestic and international newspapers for the two-hour train ride to Wilmington.
As she gathered her change, she looked up. There, on a TV above a rack of batteries and disposable cameras, was a grainy video of a gun battle at Dulles Airport. “Two Cops Killed,” the zipper reported.
“Harold,” she said, the word escaping before she realized it had.
She stared at the soundless newscast. The zipper under the video now told her the gunman hadn’t yet been found.
For some reason, she took it as verification that he was still alive.
She wondered if the same could be said of Lespasse and, maybe, Brocco.
Twelve hours earlier, Harold Middleton left the St. Regis Hotel with the sadist Eleana Soberski on his arm and a Zastava P25 in his ribs. As he and Soberski walked west along K Street, they seemed like the kind of couple not unknown in the neighborhood: a disheveled middle-aged man in a business suit, briefcase swinging at the end of his fist, and an upscale hooker exuding cold impenetrability. Except they were moving away from a four-star hotel rather than toward one for a $500 an hour “date.”
Middleton listened for police cruisers’ sirens — no doubt the cowering bartender had called the D.C. police who, in turn, would notify the FBI. Lurching along, he wondered if he’d be saved by the people he’d been trying to avoid.
He said, “Where—”
The gun nozzle raked his ribs.
“Farragut Square,” Soberski replied, “the statue. Charlotte is there.”
Middleton stumbled, but Soberski kept him upright.
“The briefcase,” he said.
“Yes, the briefcase,” Soberski replied. “Of course, the briefcase. But the briefcase is not enough.”
Middleton glanced around. K Street was empty, the sidewalks rolled up now that the dinner hour was through. In New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Krakow, Warsaw, there’d be dozens of people enjoying the night air, on their way to a new hot spot, their chatter and laughter a giddy prelude to what’s next. In Washington, you could hear the joyless scrape of the guards’ shoes outside Lafayette Park and the White House two blocks away.
“What do you mean ‘not enough’?” Middleton asked as they turned north on 16th Street.
“To me, a piece of paper.”
“My daughter—”
“Of course you would trade your Chopin for your daughter. But what else?”
They stood at the corner of Connecticut Avenue, pausing as a few taxis headed east. As Middleton caught his breath, he finally heard the wail of sirens, further off than he’d hoped, but drawing nearer.
“There’s nothing else,” he said. Fatigue clouded his thoughts. The men he’d shot in the bar were after the Chopin manuscript, weren’t they?
“Colonel Middleton,” she replied with a wry laugh. “Let’s not be silly.”
“But I don’t know what you want.”
She jabbed the gun deeper into his ribcage. “Then we will leave it that I know what you want — Charlotte and your grandchild.”
Up ahead, the traffic light changed, and Soberski led Middleton off the curb and into the street.
“Anything,” he said, as they reached the yellow line.
“Where is Faust?”
A Mercedes sedan eased to the end of the short queue of waiting cars, blocking their path.
“Faust?”
“We are aware of your relationship with Faust,” Soberski said.
“’We’? Who’s—”
Before Soberski could react, the driver of the Mercedes jutted his left arm out the open window and squeezed off a shot.
The lone round entered her face at an upward angle, penetrating a nasal bone and exploding the top of her head. Red mist filled the air above Middleton as Soberski collapsed in a heap, the Zastava tumbling from her hand.
“Leave it, Harry.”
As sirens blared, Middleton saw his son-in-law staring up at him from behind the wheel of his ex-wife’s sedan.
“Leave it and get in. Now Harry.”
Seconds later, Jack Perez twisted the wheel and skirted the queue, bursting across the intersection. He raced through a yellow light at George Washington University Hospital, intent on reaching Route 66 before the cops responded to another shooting, this one on Connecticut Avenue.
“Charley?” Middleton asked. The briefcase sat flat on his lap.
“Safe,” Perez said, tires squealing as he turned left.
“Sylvia?”
“No, Harry. They got Sylvia.”
“Where is—”
“The lake house, Harry. Charley’s at the lake house.”
Middleton wiped the side of his face, then stared as his bloody palm.
“Before we get there, Harry, you’d better tell me what’s going on.”
“They’re trying to kill me,” Middleton managed.
“Trying, but you’re not dead,” Perez said. “Sylvia, two guys in the bar, two cops at Dulles—”
“Three people in Warsaw,” Middleton heard himself say.
“And now the hooker.”
“She wasn’t—”
“That’s nine, and none of them is you.”
The ramp up ahead, and what little traffic there was flowed free.
“Jack, listen.”
Perez lifted his right hand from the wheel and silently told his father-in-law to keep still. “I just undid a lifetime’s worth of work reversing my family’s reputation for you, Harry.”
Middleton stayed quiet. He knew the Perez family had been connected in the ‘60s to the Genovese crime family through Carlo Marcello, but Army Intel said young Jack had tested clean. He never mentioned the off-the-books background check to Charley.
“In return,” Perez continued, “you tell me what you’re into.”
“There’s a Chopin manuscript in here,” Middleton said, tapping the briefcase’s lid. “It’s believed to be part of a stash the Nazis squirreled away in a church in Kosovo.”
“‘Believed’?”
“It’s a forgery. It’s not in Chopin’s hand. It’s been folded, mistreated—”
“And yet somebody thinks it’s worth nine lives?”
Middleton remembered the bodies strewn inside St. Sophia, and the dying teenage girl’s desperate cry.
“Green shirt, green shirt…please.”
“A lot more than nine, Jack.”
They were on the highway now, and Perez slid the Mercedes into the fast lane, pushing it up to 70, the sedan riding on a cloud.