“I’m Joe. From the diner,” he said. “I called.”
“I’m Dick Chambers.” They shook hands.
“Please, sir,” the worker said. He held up his cell phone. “I have the picture of the license plate. It’s hard to read but I’m sure you have computers that can make it, you know, clearer.”
“Yes, our technical department can work miracles.”
A man climbed from the car. He called, “Dick, just heard a CNN report on the radio! A fire in the recital hall. It looks big. Real big!”
Dick Chambers smiled, then turned to the man who had just shouted to him from the car.
It was Faust. His two thugs stepped out of back of the car and joined him.
“There, he’s the man I saw,” cried the agitated restaurant worker. “You have arrested him!”
But then he shook his head, seeing that Faust’s hands weren’t cuffed. “No, no, no.” He dropped the cell phone, staring at Chambers. “You’re part of it! I am dead!”
Yeah, you pretty much are, the Homeland Security man thought.
Chambers asked Faust, “What’s going on at the hall?”
“They are just preliminary reports. No one can see anything. The streets are filled with smoke. Fire trucks everywhere.”
“The recital hall! You’ve blown it up?”
He crushed the restaurant worker’s cell phone under his heel. “I’m afraid you were at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He then glanced at Faust, who pulled out a silenced pistol and began to aim it at the worker.
“Please, sir. No!”
Which is when the spotlights slammed on, fixing Chambers, Faust and the others in searing glare.
The restaurant worker dropped to the grass and scuttled away as a loudspeaker blared, “This is Emmett Kalmbach, Chambers. We’ve got snipers and they’re green lighted to shoot. On the ground. All of you.”
The DHS man blinked in shock but he hesitated only a moment. He’d been in this business a long time. He was four pounds of trigger pressure away from dead, and he knew it. He grimaced, dropped to his belly and stretched out his legs and arms. The two thugs did the same.
Faust, though, hesitated, the gun bobbing slowly in his hand.
“You, on the ground now!”
But undoubtedly Faust knew what awaited him-the interrogation, the conviction and either life in jail or a lethal needle-and chose desperate over wise. He fired toward the spotlights, then turned and began sprinting.
The lanky man who’d made a job of running from the consequences of his actions got six feet before the snipers ended his career forever.
Harry Middleton walked forward into the lights set up by the FBI Washington field office crime scene team.
He glanced at Faust’s body then shook the hand of the man who’d been their undercover decoy-the one who’d pretended to have seen Faust sneak from the recital hall.
“Jozef. You’re okay?”
“Ah, yes,” Padlo said. “A scrape on my palm getting under cover. No worse than that.”
The Polish inspector was stripping off the restaurant worker’s uniform he’d donned for the takedown. He’d flown in that morning. It was true that getting credentials for a foreign law officer to come into America was difficult, but red tape did not exist for men like Harold Middleton and his anonymous supervisors.
Padlo had learned that Faust was instrumental in the death of his lover M. T. Connolly and called Harry Middleton, insisting that he come help to find Faust and his co-conspirators. There’d be no extradition of any perpetrators to Poland, Middleton had said, but Padlo was willing to give the Americans evidence in the Jedynak murders, which could prove helpful in any prosecutions here.
Middleton joined Kalmbach and, flanked by two FBI agents, cuffed Dick Chambers, who was staring at the colonel.
“But… The fire. You were… ” His voice faded.
“Supposed to die? Along with a thousand other innocent people? Well, a team disarmed the bomb this afternoon, pumped the gas out. But we needed to buy some time while we set up this sting. If there was no fire at all, I was afraid you might panic and stonewall. So we lit a controlled fire in the construction site next door to the hall. No damage, but a lot of smoke. Enough to get us some ambiguous breaking news reports.
“Oh, if you’re interested, the concert went on as planned. The Chopin piece, by the way, was pretty good… I’d rate it A minus. I’m sure your boss enjoyed it. Interesting you gave your ticket to him, knowing that he’d die in the fire. Should have seen his face when I told him it was you who was responsible.”
Chambers knew he should just shut up. But he couldn’t help himself. He said, “How did you know?”
“Well, this story that Faust was the mastermind? Bullshit. I couldn’t believe that. He was too arrogant and impulsive. I had a feeling somebody else was behind it. But who? I had some colleagues run a computer correlation on travel to Poland and Italy in the past few months tied to any connections in that part of D.C. where Faust called pay phones. Some diplomats showed up, some businessmen. And you-who worked for the agency that quote accidentally let Vukasin into the country. I found out you also called Nowakowski in prison the day before he offered to give up the Chopin manuscript.
“You were the number-one suspect. But we needed to make sure. And we had to flush Faust. So we set you up with a phony witness as a decoy. Jozef Padlo, who you’d never met.”
“This is ridiculous. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, I do. Dick. As soon as I got the call from Poland about the first Chopin manuscript, I became suspicious and made some calls. Intelligence from Northern Europeans suggested possible terrorist activity originating in Poland and Rome. Music might have something to do with it. So I went along, to see what was up. The trail led to a possible nerve-gas attack in Baltimore. We got the chemicals and it looked like the end of the story, except for tracking down Faust.
“But I got to thinking about things the other night. An attack out of revenge for our meddling in the Balkans? No, the ethnic cleansing there was about politics and land, not religious fundamentalism. That didn’t fit the profile. Maybe Vukasin bought into the ideology but the main players, Faust and Rugova? No, they were all about money.
“And codes of nerve gas in a manuscript? Just the sort of thing the intelligence gurus would love and keep us from looking at the big picture. But in these days of scramblers and cryptography, there were better ways to get formulae from one country to another. No, something else was going on. But what? I decided I needed to analyze the situation differently. I looked at it the same way I look at music manuscripts to decide if they’re authentic: as a whole. Did this seem to be an authentic terrorist plot? No. The next logical question was what did the fake nerve-gas plot accomplish?
“Only one thing: It brought me and the rest of the Volunteers out of retirement. That was your point, of course. To eliminate us. The Volunteers.”
It was Kalmbach who asked, “But why, Harry?”
“Close to a billion dollars in stolen art and sculpture and manuscripts-stolen by the Nazis from throughout Europe and stashed in a dozen churches and schools in Kosovo, Serbia and Albania. Just like at St. Sophia. We knew that Chambers did a brief tour in the Balkans but got out fast. He must’ve met Rugova and learned about the loot. Then he bankrolled the operation and hired Faust to oversee it.
“A few years passed and they wanted to cash in by selling the pieces to private collectors. But Rugova preempted them-and he got careless. He didn’t cover his tracks and word got around about the treasures. It was only a matter of time until the Volunteers started to put the pieces together. So Chambers and Faust had to eliminate Rugova-and us too. But to keep suspicion off them they had to make it seem like part of a real terrorist attack. They brought Vukasin and his thugs over here.
“Well, after I realized his motive, I just looked for what would be the perfect way to kill all of us. And it was obvious: an attack at the recital hall.”