he was involved made her uneasy. Real uneasy. “Now will someone explain to me what’s going on?” she asked.
“We can talk in the conference room,” Kalmbach said.
“Agent Connolly,” the man from Homeland Security said, “we seem to have a communications problem that I hope we can all work out in person.” He’d taken a seat at the head of the mahogany conference table, wordlessly indicating his place in the hierarchy.
“What sort of ‘communication problem’?” she asked.
“Agent Connolly,” Kalmbach said, “what happened at Dulles Airport falls cleanly within the jurisdiction of the Virginia police. I thought I made it clear that the situation there is of no concern to the Bureau.”
That wasn’t what he’d said, of course. He seemed to be performing for the man from DHS. But she knew better than to argue with Emmett Kalmbach over what he had or had not told her.
“Actually,” Connolly said, holding up the CD that Bruce Ardsley had made for her, “I think it’s very much of concern to the Bureau. Our own facial-recognition software has identified two Serbian war criminals who’ve entered the country illegally, one of them using a false British passport under the name-”
“Why are you trying to locate Harold Middleton?” Chambers interrupted, taking the disk from her hand.
“Because he’s a material witness,” Connolly said. “In an international case that involves a triple homicide in Warsaw, and another one, or possibly by now two-”
“Was I not absolutely clear?” Kalmbach said, his face flushing, but the DHS man put a hand on Kalmbach’s sleeve, apparently to silence him.
“Agent Connolly,” Chambers said softly, “Harold Middleton’s file is blue-striped.”
She looked at him, then nodded. A blue stripe indicated that a file was sealed for national-security reasons. Part of Middleton’s military record had been designated as codeword-classified. That meant a level above even top secret.
“Why?” she asked finally.
Kalmbach scowled and said nothing. The man from Homeland replied, “How do I put this in a language you’ll understand? This is above your pay grade, Agent Connolly.”
“Meaning I’m off the case?” she blurted out.
“No, Agent Connolly,” Chambers said. “Meaning that there is no case.”
10
Leonora Tesla stepped out of the yellow taxi on the busy northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 35th Street, and hustled into Macy’s. She emerged with her hair trimmed short and punked, wearing a black button-down blouse with the collar curled high, black slacks and black flats-in many ways, the opposite of what she wore 24 hours earlier when she killed Gunter Schmidt. A new black-leather shoulder bag, tucked tight under her arm, held a change of underwear and what remained from the moment she steered Schmidt’s body toward the ravaging hyenas down in the wadi: her sunglasses, cash, credit cards and passport, her portfolio and her most valued possession, her fully loaded iPod, a gift from Harold Middleton.
She called the Human Rights Observer from a payphone in Herald Square. An intern answered and told her Val Brocco hadn’t come in. A flu, she reported; his message said he intended to spend a second day in bed. Tesla decided against giving her name and demanding his latest cell number, consoling herself with the thought that Brocco’s bordering-on-obsessive sense of precaution might serve him well. It’d better: To find Middleton, they’d tried to kill her, sending an agent to Namibia for the task. No doubt they already had at least one agent in metro D.C., where Middleton and Brocco were based.
Next, from the lobby of Madison Square Garden, she tried Jean-Marc Lespasse in Parkwood, North Carolina. Mr. Lespasse, she was told, was no longer with TDD-Technologie de Demain, the company he founded. And, no, the receptionist added tersely, there’s no forwarding information. Sure enough, the last cell number Tesla had for Lespasse was no longer active.
Downstairs into Penn Station, Tesla paid cash for a one-way ticket on the Acela Express to Washington’s Union Station, though she planned to get off in Delaware. Checking the overhead departure board, she saw she had enough time to run to the newsstand for a pre-paid cell phone and an array of domestic and international newspapers for the two-hour train ride to Wilmington.
As she gathered her change, she looked up. There, on a TV above a rack of batteries and disposable cameras, was a grainy video of a gun battle at Dulles Airport. “Two Cops Killed,” the zipper reported.
“Harold,” she said, the word escaping before she realized it had.
She stared at the soundless newscast. The zipper under the video now told her the gunman hadn’t yet been found.
For some reason, she took it as verification that he was still alive.
She wondered if the same could be said of Lespasse and, maybe, Brocco.
Twelve hours earlier, Harold Middleton left the St. Regis Hotel with the sadist Eleana Soberski on his arm and a Zastava P25 in his ribs. As he and Soberski walked west along K Street, they seemed like the kind of couple not unknown in the neighborhood: a disheveled middle-aged man in a business suit, briefcase swinging at the end of his fist, and an upscale hooker exuding cold impenetrability. Except they were moving away from a four-star hotel rather than toward one for a $500 an hour “date.”
Middleton listened for police cruisers’ sirens-no doubt the cowering bartender had called the D.C. police who, in turn, would notify the FBI. Lurching along, he wondered if he’d be saved by the people he’d been trying to avoid.
He said, “Where-”
The gun nozzle raked his ribs.
“Farragut Square,” Soberski replied, “the statue. Charlotte is there.”
Middleton stumbled, but Soberski kept him upright.
“The briefcase,” he said.
“Yes, the briefcase,” Soberski replied. “Of course, the briefcase. But the briefcase is not enough.”
Middleton glanced around. K Street was empty, the sidewalks rolled up now that the dinner hour was through. In New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Krakow, Warsaw, there’d be dozens of people enjoying the night air, on their way to a new hot spot, their chatter and laughter a giddy prelude to what’s next. In Washington, you could hear the joyless scrape of the guards’ shoes outside Lafayette Park and the White House two blocks away.
“What do you mean ‘not enough’?” Middleton asked as they turned north on 16th Street.
“To me, a piece of paper.”
“My daughter-”
“Of course you would trade your Chopin for your daughter. But what else?”
They stood at the corner of Connecticut Avenue, pausing as a few taxis headed east. As Middleton caught his breath, he finally heard the wail of sirens, further off than he’d hoped, but drawing nearer.
“There’s nothing else,” he said. Fatigue clouded his thoughts. The men he’d shot in the bar were after the Chopin manuscript, weren’t they?
“Colonel Middleton,” she replied with a wry laugh. “Let’s not be silly.”
“But I don’t know what you want.”
She jabbed the gun deeper into his ribcage. “Then we will leave it that I know what you want-Charlotte and your grandchild.”
Up ahead, the traffic light changed, and Soberski led Middleton off the curb and into the street.
“Anything,” he said, as they reached the yellow line.
“Where is Faust?”
A Mercedes sedan eased to the end of the short queue of waiting cars, blocking their path.
