Middleton said, “Your uncle?”
Faust said, “This is Felicia Kaminski. Temporarily going as Joanna Phelps, but she’s Henryk Jedynak’s niece. Or, she was.” Then he pointed at Middleton and addressed the girl and said, “And this is Colonel Harold Middleton. He saw your uncle in Warsaw. Your uncle was a brave man. He stole a page. He knew what was at stake. But he didn’t get away with it.”
“Who did this to him?”
“We’ll get to that. First we need to know if he put the truth on paper.”
Faust took out the rest of the first-movement manuscript and handed it to the girl. She spread it out in sequence. She followed the melody with her finger, humming silently. She raised the piano’s lid again and picked out phrases on the keys, haltingly. She jumped to the bloodstained page and continued. Middleton nodded to himself. He heard continuity, logic, sense.
Until the last measure.
The last measure was where the movement should have come home to rest, with a whole note that settled back to the root of the native key, with calm and implacable inevitability. But it didn’t. Instead it hung suspended in midair with an absurd discordant trill, sixteenth notes battling it out through the whole of the bar, a dense black mess on the page, a harsh beating pulse in the room.
The girl said, “The last bar can’t be right.”
Faust said, “Apparently.”
The girl played the trill again, faster. Said, “OK, now I see.”
“See what?”
“The two notes are discordant. Play them fast enough, and the inter-modulation between them implies a third note that isn’t actually there. But you can kind of hear it. And it’s the right note. It would be very obvious on a violin.”
Middleton said, “Chopin didn’t write like that.”
The girl said, “I know.”
Faust asked, “What’s the implied note?”
The girl played the trill for half a bar and then stabbed a key in between and a pure tone rang out, sweet and correct and reassuring. She said, “Two notes.”
Faust said, “Sounds like one to me.”
“The last note of this movement and the first of the next. That’s Chopin. Who did this to my uncle?”
Faust didn’t answer, because right then the door opened and Vukasin walked in. He had a silenced Glock held down by his thigh and from six feet away Middleton could smell that it had been used, and recently. Faust said, “We’re all here.” He made the formal introductions, one to the other, Vukasin, Middleton, Nacho, Kaminski. He let his gaze rest on Kaminski and said, “Colonel Middleton killed your uncle. He tortured that page out of him and then cut his throat. In Warsaw, after their lunch.”
“Not true,” Middleton said.
“True,” Vukasin said. “I saw him leave. I went in and found the body. Three bodies. Two bystanders got in the way, apparently.”
Faust stepped aside as Nacho took Middleton’s arms and pinned him. Vukasin raised the silenced Glock and pointed it at Middleton’s face. Then Vukasin lowered the gun again and reversed it in his hand and offered it butt- first to the girl. Said, “Your uncle. Your job, if you want it.”
The girl got up off the piano stool and stepped around the end of the keyboard and came forward. Took the gun from Vukasin, who said, “It’s ready to go. No safety on a Glock. Just point and shoot, like a cheap camera. There won’t be much noise.”
Then he stood off to her left. She raised the gun and aimed it where he had aimed it, at the bridge of Middleton’s nose. The muzzle wavered a little, in small jerky circles. With the sound suppressor it was a long and heavy weapon.
Middleton said, “They’re lying.”
The girl nodded.
“I know,” she said.
She turned to her left, twisting from the waist, and shot Vukasin in the face. He had been right. There wasn’t much noise. Just a bang like a heavy book being slammed on a table, and a wet crunch as the bullet hit home, and the soft tumble of a body falling on thick carpet. Then nothing, just the stink of gunpowder and pooling blood.
The girl twisted back, and lined up on Faust.
“Middleton understands music,” she said. “I can see that from here. He wouldn’t need to torture that melody out of anyone. It was predictable. Like night follows day.”
Faust said, “I didn’t know.”
“The two discordant notes,” the girl said. “Making a phantom third. My uncle always called it a wolf tone. And Vukasin means wolf, in Polish. It was a coded message. He was naming his killer.”
“I didn’t know,” Faust said again. “I swear.”
“Talk.”
“I hired Vukasin. Someone else must have gotten to him. Hired him out from under me. He was double crossing me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I swear. And we can’t waste time on this. The music holds more code than who killed your uncle.”
“He’s right, Felicia,” Middleton said. “First things first. It’s about nerve gas. It could make 9/11 look like a day at the beach.”
“And it’s coming soon,” Faust said.
Kaminski nodded.
“Days away,” she said.
She lowered the gun.
“Forty notes,” Faust said. “Forty letters between A and G. It’s not enough.”
“Add in the Mozart cadenza,” Kaminski said. “That’s bullshit too.”
Middleton said, “Mozart didn’t write cadenzas.”
Kaminski nodded. “Exactly. He didn’t write twenty-eight piano concertos, either. The cadenza is part of the message. Same board, same game.”
Faust asked, “Which first?”
“Mozart. He was before Chopin.”
“Then how many notes?”
“The two things together, a couple hundred in total, maybe.”
“Still not enough. And you can’t spell stuff out using only A through G. Especially not in German.”
“There are sharps and flats. The Mozart is in D-minor.”
“You can’t sharpen and flatten letters of the alphabet.”
“Numbers,” Middleton said. “It’s not letters of the alphabet. It’s numbers.”
“One for A, two for B? That’s still not enough. This thing is complex.”
“Not one for A,” Middleton said. “Concert pitch. The A above middle C is 440 cycles per second. Each note has a specific frequency. Sharps and flats, equally. A couple hundred notes would yield eighty-thousand digits. Like a bar code. Eighty-thousand digits would yield all the information you want.”
Faust asked, “How do we work it out?”
“With a calculator,” Middleton said. “On the treble stave the second space up is the A above middle C. That’s 440 cycles. An octave higher is the first overtone, or the second harmonic, 880 cycles. An octave lower is 220 cycles. We can work out the intervals in between. We’ll probably get a bunch of decimal places, which is even better. The more digits, the more information.”
Faust nodded. Nothing in his face. He retrieved the Mozart manuscript from the credenza and butted it together with the smeared page in the glassine envelope. Clamped the stack under his arm and nodded to Nacho. Then he looked at Kaminski and Middleton and suddenly leapt forward, ripping the silenced Glock from her hand.
He said, “I wasn’t entirely honest before. I didn’t hire Vukasin. We were both hired by someone else. For the
