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
“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 chemicals 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.