he stood spotlighted by the door’s white light-a perfect target.
He ran down the stairs. Ran toward the glowing swoop of the main terminal.
A jumbo jet dropped out of the sky, skimmed over his head as he staggered across a runway. He ran under a second airliner as it climbed into the night. The pressure changing wakes of those jet engines popped his gunshot-deafened ears.
Suddenly, blessedly, he heard jet engines roar.
Get to Scotland, he thought. Got to get to Scotland.
The strap of his briefcase boa-constrictored his chest as he gasped for oxygen. Sweat stuck his shirt to his skin. His leg muscles burned and felt as if someone smashed a baseball bat into his right kneecap.
He knew better than to try for his car. They-whoever they were-might be waiting for him in the parking garage.
Pistol shoved in the back waistband of his pants, Middleton loped to the front of the main terminal. No one paid much attention-people run through airports all the time. A long line of people stood waiting their turn for a taxi.
To his left, he saw a young couple exiting a Town Car. He burst between them, leapt into the back seat before the driver could protest.
“Go!”
The man behind the wheel stared into the rearview mirror.
“Two-fifty,” Middleton said, digging into his pocket for U.S. currency.
He sank into the backseat cushion of the taxi as it shot away from the terminal. “Capitol Hill.”
The driver let him out in front of the Supreme Court that glowed like a gray-stone temple across from Congress’ white-castle Capitol. Middleton walked through a park and saw no one but the nocturnal outline of a patrolling Capitol Hill policeman and his leashed German shepherd.
Scotland was a hotel built back when visiting Washington wasn’t a big business. Middleton passed through the hotel’s glass doors, walked straight to the registration desk.
“No sir, no young woman by that name is registered. No Mister and Missus either. No sir, no messages. Yes sir, I’ll call you at the bar if anything changes. Oh wait, what was your name? Excuse me: Sir? Sir?”
In the dark lounge, Middleton told the bartender, “Glenfiddich, rocks.”
After the ice melted in his drink, Middleton concluded that his daughter wasn’t coming. Wasn’t here. Wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
He laid the cell phone he’d snatched off the floor beside his glass on the bar. A pre-pay. Not his. He fished his phone from his briefcase. Ached to call someone, anyone. But he couldn’t risk a monster hacking and tracking his calls. Besides, who could he talk to? Who could he trust now? Maybe killers had infiltrated Uncle Sam’s badges too.
Breathe. Breathe.
You’re a musician. Be like Beethoven. Hear the full, true symphony.
Do what you do best.
Interpret. Authenticate.
Whatever this was started in Europe. Could still be evolving there with other assassins, other terrors. Started way back with Kosovo, a war criminal, and a phantom mastermind. Was worth killing for. Worth dying for.
From Poland, the fake cop rode the plane that Middleton was supposed to be on. He might have spotted an airport cop getting off shift, followed him to his parking spot, snapped his neck, stuffed the dead cop in the trunk of his own car, stripped the corpse of clothes, weapons and IDs. As a cop in uniform, the killer strolled into the airport to meet every plane from Paris.
But who were his partners?
Focus on what makes sense.
I know something. Or someone. That’s why they wanted to kill me. I have something that somebody wants. Or am something. I did something.
But the truth is, I’m not that important.
Wasn’t. Am now.
That new truth is calibrated in blood.
In his mind, Middleton heard random notes, not a symphony. He flashed on jazz. When asked how a musician could slip into a free form jam that he’d neither started nor would finish, legendary pianist Night Train Jones said: “You gotta play with both hands.”
Middleton put his cell phone inside his shirt pocket.
Stared at the cell phone he’d found spinning on the floor in a combat zone.
The phone had been turned on when Middleton grabbed it. If someone could locate a cell phone just because it was turned on, they were already rocketing toward him. Middleton found the “recent calls” screen. On the inside front cover of the paperback Camus novel, Middleton wrote the phone number that this cell phone had connected to for 3 minutes and 19 seconds. That same number sent this phone one text message:
122 S FREEMNT A BALMORE
Baltimore, thought Middleton. A 40-minute drive from this bar stool. A train ride from Union Station kitty- corner to the hotel. A few blocks north of the train station was a bus depot from which silver boxes roared up Interstate 95 to Charm City where Middleton spent a lot of time at the Peabody Conservatory of Music.
Middleton wrote the address inside the novel’s cover.
He went to the men’s room and, in the clammy locked stall, counted his remaining cash: $515 American, $122 in Euros. Credit cards, but the second he used one to buy a ticket, meal or motel, he would pop up on the grid. He checked the ammo magazine in his scavenged Beretta: eight bullets.
Can go a long way and nowhere at all on what I’ve got, thought Harold Middleton.
Back on the bar stool, he realized he reeked of frenzy. The bar mirror made him flinch. He looked terrible. Burned out and all but buried. Worse, he looked memorable.
Middleton left enough cash on the bar, walked toward the night.
He turned away from well-lit streets, still not ready to risk a phone call or a train or a bus or shelter for the night. Walked past empty office buildings.
Out of the darkness loomed a man brandishing a butcher knife. Middleton froze two paces from a blade that would’ve punctured his throat.
Butcher-knife man growled: “Give it up! Cash. Wallet. Hurry!”
So Middleton reached under his gray sports jacket and came out with Beretta steel.
“Go, baby!” yelled the robber to a waiting car. He dropped the knife.
“Freeze, baby,” Middleton shouted, “or I’ll blow his head off, then kill you too!”
Middleton kept the robber in his vision while turned toward the rusted car idling at the curb, its front passenger door gaping open like the maw of a shark.
Never heard it roll up behind me. Never saw it coming. Wake up!
The robber said: “We want a lawyer!”
Middleton jerked his head toward the open car door-but kept his gun locked on the robber. “Get in and you might get out of this alive.”
The hands-high scruffy man eased into the shotgun seat of the idling car. Middleton slid into the backseat behind him, told the boney young woman with blazing eyes behind the steering wheel, “Do what I say or I’ll blast a bullet in your spine.”
“Baby!” yelled her partner. “You were supposed to beat it outta trouble!”
Not anger, thought Middleton, that’s not the music. More a plea. And sorrow.
“Fool! He’d have lit you up! Word, Marcus: I ain’t never gonna leave you go.”
“‘Knew you weren’t meant for no thug life.” Notes of pride. Sorrow.
“Where?” the woman asked the dark silhouette in her rearview mirror.
“We’re going to Baltimore,” Middleton said. “Drive.”
