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 throat. 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.”
“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.”