have to assume that anything she said was meant to mislead and to manipulate. Faust was our boogeyman-our white whale-and she knew that. What better way to get your attention than dangle his name?”
“She didn’t have to dangle anything, Nora. She had a gun in my ribs.”
Blowing out more smoke, Lespasse said, “She thought she was going to be interrogating you, Harry. She was laying groundwork, putting you off balance. She-”
Before Lespasse could finish, Middleton’s cell phone burred. He found it in a pocket, flipped it open and heard only static. And then a faraway voice, old and struggling in English.
“Colonel Middleton? My name is Abraham Nowakowski. I’m calling from Rome and I have a message from Felicia Kaminski-Henryk Jedynak’s niece. An urgent message.”
Harold Middleton listened intently for several minutes. Then he said, “Ciao, Signor Abe, mille grazie.” Closing his phone, he let out a massive breath. Tesla and Lespasse looked at him expectantly.
“Speak of the devil, and the devil appears,” Middleton said. “Faust. He’s in the country, and close-up in Baltimore. He’s got something Henryk Jedynak was holding for me, and he’s got Jedynak’s niece too.”
“Baltimore? What the hell is he doing in Baltimore?” Lespasse asked.
“I don’t know. Jedynak’s niece managed to get a call out to a family friend in Rome-that’s who was on the line. From what he said, it sounds like Faust has some sort of operation going on there, but the girl was cut off after a minute.”
“Did she say where in Baltimore Faust is?” Tesla asked.
“No, but she did tell her friend where she and Faust would be tomorrow-check that-tonight. A place called Kali’s Court, on Thames Street. Apparently the two of them are going there for dinner. Just the two of them. I’m thinking that maybe we should join them.”
Tesla and Lespasse looked at Middleton. Tesla shook her head. “Join them? You can’t be serious, Harry-with only three of us.”
“We need backup for something like that, Colonel,” Lespasse said. “Unless what you want is in and out, bang, bang, bang.”
Middleton shook his head. “That’s appealing, but not smart. No, we need to talk to this guy, and at length. So backup it is.” Harry opened his phone again and clicked through his list of contacts. He stopped on an entry marked E.K. and hit dial.
The phone rang once.
The voice in Middleton’s ear said, “It’s about time you called, Harry. But then I guess you’ve had your hands full lately.”
“I need a team, Emmett,” Middleton said. “In Baltimore.”
“Sure you do, Harry. And what about what I need?”
“We can talk about that too, after we settle Baltimore.”
“We can fuckin’ talk about it now.”
“It’s been real bad luck for people to run into you lately, Harry. We’ve got bodies at Dulles, downtown on Sixteenth Street and two assholes with fake Bureau IDs in a bar nearby. Okay, sure, self-defense. But you still have to answer questions. And we can’t stop the local boys from bringing you in if they find out. Jesus, you should’ve told us from the beginning what was going on.
“Guess what, Emmett. Somebody forgot to send me an agenda. I didn’t know what was going on. And I still don’t.”
“Be that as it may, we need to talk.”
“No time, Emmett. My battery’s running low.”
“Not to worry, Harry, we can talk about it over coffee. Say in five minutes, in the hospital cafeteria.” Middleton looked left, right, overhead. On the phone Kalmbach laughed nastily. “On your left,” he said. “Across the street.”
Middleton peered into the darkness and a pair of headlights of a Bureau-issued car winked once, twice at him. Emmett Kalmbach was still laughing. “Cream and two sugars for me, Harry.”
In his suite at the Harbor Court Hotel, the man known as Faust answered the muted beep of a cell phone. The voice on the other end was faraway and old. Faust listened intently, and a small, satisfied smile played on his lips. “Well done, Signor Abe,” he said.
Faust put his phone down and looked across the sitting room, into the smaller of the suite’s two bedrooms. A splash of light fell across the king-sized bed, and in it he could see Kaminski’s pale face on the pillow, and a spray of blond hair.
“Charming,” he said again, to no one in particular.
12
There was something about Fells Point that put Harold Middleton in a foul mood. Maybe it had to do with the fight at The Horse You Came In Saloon that got him booted out of West Point. Maybe it related to the scar on his left temple left by a bar stool-the one that still throbbed whenever the thermometer dipped below 40.
This dank place changed my life, he thought, entering the fog that clung like bad luck to Baltimore’s Thames Street.
Charley’s miscarriage; his ex-wife Sylvia’s violent death; the mayhem and destruction that trailed him since the meeting in Krakow: Now he was determined to right all that, coming on like St. George to slay the dragon as in the richly colored depiction by Raphael Sanzio he admired, even if Faust had chosen Kali’s Court in some sort of a sick cosmic joke. He smiled to himself. Wasn’t Kali the Hindu goddess of annihilation?
As he peered through the fog, Middleton reminded himself to focus. The forces aligned against him were vile and dark. The equation he followed was simple. He had come to slay evil, which had manifested in numbing complexity.
Nora Tesla’s voice squawked in his earpiece. “Target’s in. Alone.”
That’s strange, he thought, marching over the same cobblestones he’d been tossed to like trash so many years ago. “Kaminski isn’t with him?”
“I said, ‘Alone.’”
So you did. Middleton pushed his shoulders back, fixed the collar of his coat and entered the restaurant. A hostess with a frosted smile stopped him with hard blue eyes. “You have a reservation?”
“I’m meeting someone. A man. Mid-thirties, long dark hair, slicked back, tall. Just arrived… ”
“I know him. Yes.” Suddenly flummoxed, she managed to smile and frown at the same time. “He said he was dining alone.”
“Not tonight, my dear.”
Middleton’s Dover Saddlery riding boots reverberated confidently across the walnut floor past Tesla and Lespasse in a nearby booth, along with an FBI agent and another man, ambiguously titled, but one whose job became clearer if you knew his phone number was an exchange near Crystal City, Virginia, the home of the Pentagon.
Outside, in a control van, were some other distinguished visitors: Emmett Kalmbach and Homeland Security’s Richard Chambers.
Such seniority at a surveillance operation was unusual. But Faust was such a wild card, and the recent shootings so troubling, that both the major agencies responsible for tracking foreign threats within the U.S. wanted direct involvement. Middleton knew Kalmbach. The man could be spineless, but Middleton didn’t care; all the easier to get what he wanted from the feebies on Ninth Street. As for Dick Chambers, the regional director wouldn’t have much personal interest in Faust. The politics of the Balkans hadn’t intrigued him. He’d made one trip to the region during the conflicts, apparently deemed it solvable by underlings and headed off for the Middle East-where he saw more of a threat to the U.S., about which he was right, of course.
