“Send the pictures to my email address at the Bureau and I’ll send the cop-killer’s to you.”
“Of course, Buttercup.”
She smiled. “You know, Jozef, maybe I can get clearances and have a ticket for you at the airport. I mean, you know these people better than we do, and your assistance could be invaluable.”
“Amazingly, I’ve already told my commissioner that by helping you we can quite possibly help solve Jedynak’s murder and bring the killer back here to justice. Maybe you can arrange to have someone meet me at Dulles?”
“I think I can arrange that, Inspector Padlo.”
The Slav’s name was Vukasin, which meant Wolf, and he was not pleased with how badly things were going. Waiting in a car outside the St. Regis for two of his men, he stiffened at the sight of the elegant woman who had climbed from a cab across the street. She approached his vehicle, opened the door and slid inside.
“Eleana,” he said in their native tongue, “your timing is perfect.”
“How could I pass up an opportunity to work with dear old friends? And it’s Jessica, please.”
“Jessica. Very American. Good.”
The woman seated beside Vukasin was a Serbian national named Eleana Soberski who was now, thanks to forged documents, a U.S. citizen. Soberski had been a child psychologist before serving as an Intel gatherer assigned to Rugova’s forces. The real Jessica Harris had been a volunteer nurse at the central hospital in Belgrade, a woman without close family in the States. She had become eel food in the Danube, compliments of the woman aspiring to steal her identity.
Soberski’s primary duty with the KLA during the cleansing action had been interrogating captured enemy soldiers and civilians collected by Rugova’s unit. Vukasin, one of Rugova’s lieutenants, had seen her work and admired her interrogation methods and enthusiasm. A beauty without a sympathy gene, she rejected the soldiers’ overtures and Vukasin came to believe she derived sexual pleasure only when she had utterly terrified people lashed to a table, a chair or hanging from the rafters in excruciating pain.
“Your target is here at this hotel?” she asked.
Vukasin took a picture of two men at a table in a restaurant out of his pocket and handed it to her. “The target is this one-Harold Middleton, who led the Volunteers that tracked Agim and found him.”
Her expression hardened. “This is Harold Middleton? I thought he would be more impressive. Where is he?”
“We’re not yet sure.”
“And you believe he will come here. To a bar. In public.”
Vukasin nodded. His ex-wife had been persuaded by his men to list places were Middleton might flee. The St. Regis was one.
“Do you have men inside there?” Harris asked.
“They’re on the way.” Vukasin smiled. “They’re disguised as FBI agents. It will be effective: Middleton is wanted for shooting a policeman at the airport.”
“A policeman?”
Vukasin explained.
“A fiasco,” Harris said. “Where is Dragan now?”
“Deceased. What choice did I have? He put everything at risk.”
“And why do we care about Middleton?”
Vukasin took the picture from her. “This other man is Henryk Jedynak, a collector and expert in rare music documents. Jedynak is no longer with us either. You can ask Middleton why.”
“I will gladly do so,” Harris replied. “But surely there is more to this than the death of music collector… ”
Vukasin was tired, but it was the true she needed to know what the mission was. Now was a good time to tell her.
“Middleton was at St. Sophia with the peace keepers and he was among those given the task of cataloguing the musical manuscripts-the ones that remained at the church before we could remove them. Three years ago, Jedynak was asked to authenticate a few of the manuscripts Middleton left behind. When they were to be sold to a private collector, it was discovered that Jedynak replaced the manuscripts with fakes.
“The seller was Rugova,” Vukasin added.
“And he expected a price sufficient to cover his costs of buying his freedom,” Harris said.
“When I interrogated Jedynak, he admitted to his crime, but I could not persuade him to tell me where the original manuscripts were.”
Harris smiled wryly. Vukasin knew only violence, and not the more subtle and sophisticated methods that were needed when interrogating true believers.
“He did tell me that Middleton was in possession of something he doesn’t know he has, but would discover it soon enough.”
“You squandered a valuable resource.”
“I hardly need you to tell me what I have or haven’t done.”
But it was so. Jedynak had taken knowledge to the grave, and now his niece was gone too-stolen from under the noses of his men in Rome. What she knows remained a mystery.
Vukasin said, “I believe the key is somehow in a Chopin manuscript Jedynak gave to Middleton.”
“Real or fake?” Harris asked.
Vukasin looked at her and raised an eyebrow. There was no reason to believe Jedynak could’ve known the real manuscript needed to be moved now. Vukasin had waited three years to seek its return.
Harris saw Vukasin bristle. “It was you who got to Rugova and his wife, wasn’t it?” she asked, her voice rich with flattery.
Vukasin nodded. He was glad to tell her about how he’d accomplished the seemingly impossible.
“Colonel Rugova was desperate,” he said. “Guards were bribed ahead of my visit, and I went in disguised as a lawyer from the Tribunal needing Rugova’s signature on some documents. My fountain pen leaked, and the poisoned ink on the colonel’s fingers did its job in seven or eight hours.”
Vukasin smiled. “You know, the colonel was glad to see me. He was amused by my disguise, and very pleased when I told him we had a plan to get him to safety. He was unaware, of course, his wife had surrendered his journals-we had everything he was going to use for leverage. He even named the men who paid him for the treasures-his benefactors. In the end, the great Colonel Rugova was a simple coward without loyalty or honor.”
“I wish I could have been there.”
Vukasin lit a small cigar and watched as a car pulled up. His two men exited and entered the hotel side by side.
“Now we’ll see if Middleton is inside,” he said.
“And if he’s not…?”
“His daughter,” he replied. “Charlotte. Pregnant, by the way.”
“Once I have Charlotte in the same room with him… ” She smiled at the thought and rubbed her long delicate hands together vigorously. “Does he love anybody else?”
“A woman he worked with named Tesla. Leonora Tesla.”
“If we had the Tesla woman, that might almost be as effective-if he still cares about her. But a pregnant daughter is preferable.”
7
The car’s interior reeked of almost archeological skank, old greasy food wrappers gumming the floor, malt liquor cans cluttering the wheel wells, ashtrays brimming with stale butts. The air-conditioner stuttered and coughed, exhaling a mildewy coolness, while the three bodies added an additional tang of gamey sweat-not just Middleton but Marcus and Traci, his would-be muggers. He’d learned their names from the nonstop badgering back and forth, relentless recriminations salted with snapshot details from their shattered biographies-their fumbling needs, their aching wants, their pitiless crank habits, promises to amend, curses in reply, testaments fired back and forth in a fierce vulgar slang that Middleton could barely decipher. Meanwhile, the car bumped and rattled north toward Baltimore, a lone headlight pointing the way along I-495’s rain-wet asphalt. A brief summer storm had come and gone, turning the night air cottony thick and hot, against which the dying air-conditioner merely chattered. Middleton’s sport jacket clung to his shoulders and arms like a second skin, and he wiped his face with his free hand, the other damply gripping the Beretta.