The chauffeur spoke. “I’ve been watching it.” Crane liked the sound of him-there was authority in the voice, a man who knew how to get things done.
The chauffeur floored the gas pedal. The limo’s tires spun and screeched, and the acceleration threw them deep into their seats.
As they left the other limo sucking their exhaust, the chauffeur commanded, “Get out the weapons.”
Crane saw his host jab a button on his plush armrest. A door dropped open behind the driver’s seat. He pulled out an MP5 submachine gun and quickly slid it over the seat to the chauffeur. Then he grabbed the other gun for himself and rested it gingerly on his lap.
“It’s Jana,” the driver said angrily. “I could see her through the windshield. How did she find us?”
“How should I know?”
“It’s your job, dammit! You’ve screwed up!”
Crane was stunned. The chauffeur was questioning the Scorpion. He was giving the Scorpion orders. He was telling him he had failed. And the Scorpion was doing nothing to take back control.
As the limo raced onward, Crane noticed that the window between the front and rear seats had remained open the whole time. The chauffeur had heard everything. Crane thought back quickly, remembering when he saw the man in the tenement foyer and asked whether he was the Scorpion. ‘You’re a smart lad,’ he’d said, and that was all he’d said, which was no answer at all. He had dodged the question.
Crane felt his heart pound. The disguise of chauffeur was perfect to conceal the Scorpion’s legendary secret identity while carrying out business. There was only one answer that made sense-the chauffeur was the boss. Could the chauffeur be the real Scorpion?
The second limo pulled up again and the window on the front passenger side rolled down. Crane looked inside. He caught a gauzy image of the driver-a beautiful woman with long lustrous dark hair dancing in the slipstream. Her left hand was on the wheel. Her right, out of view.
She glanced at Crane and he felt a shiver-from her beauty and from what he saw as a fanatic’s fire in her eyes. Captivating, terrifying. Then she lost all interest in him and instead focused on the other two men in the vehicle. Something about her gaze as she looked at the driver registered disappointment. She hesitated only a moment then lifted a machine pistol. Perhaps an Uzi, perhaps a Mac-10. As Crane gasped and cringed, a firestorm sprouted from the muzzle and, like amplified hail, the bullets slammed in the windows, flicking loudly but ineffectively off the armored sheet metal and bulletproof glass. Dismay spread on Jana’s face and she wrenched the wheel to the right, forcing their limo into a grassy shoulder, where it bounced to a halt.
Jana’s vehicle vanished into a cloud of dust.
“How did she find us?” the driver snapped.
“Followed him?” The man in the backseat glanced at Crane, who noticed that he held his pistol firmly in a steady hand. He wondered if he was about to die.
The driver spun around and snapped, “You can never underestimate anyone in this. Never.”
The man beside him said, “What do we do about him?”
The driver considered. “Mr. Crane, there’s a train station at the end of that road there. You see it?”
“Yes.”
“You can get a train that will take you back to Paris. I’m afraid we have other concerns.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Follow the London lead. But be careful. Whatever you do, be careful.”
Crane climbed out of the limo, which rocked out of the soft shoulder and made a U turn, the opposite of the direction Jana had sped in.
The reporter, now shaking and breathless from the incident, began hiking toward the road. His reporter’s instinct gave him an important message: The woman had been intent on killing the Scorpion but the frown of disappointment when she saw the men in the limo told him that neither man was, in fact, that reclusive character.
Anyone with common sense would walk away from this story. It was beyond dangerous, but somewhere deep inside him he, the Crane, loved that. He was ugly, but his mind and spirit were beautiful. His curiosity was inflamed, and like a lover in the first fiery flush of requitement, he would see himself skinned and beheaded before he would let go of this amazing story.
He pulled out his cell and ran down the street. In the distance, police sirens screamed. He ignored them. His mind was on London and what he would find there.
3
Felicia Kaminski was playing Bach-Partita number two in D minor, the Chaconne, some of the most difficult solo violin music ever written-when the man with the gun burst through the door.
There was a woman behind the frantic, worried figure moving forcefully into the front room of the little terraced cottage on London’s Lamb’s Conduit Street. She was tall and elegant, with long dark hair and something that looked like a machine pistol-Kaminski wished weapons were not so familiar-extended in her right hand.
The young Polish musician placed her Bela Szepessy fiddle and bow on the antique walnut table by the window and said, “Harold. Leonora. So nice to see you again. How is the music business these days? Slow or fast? Looking at you at this moment it is difficult for me to judge. Are you here for my debut at the Wigmore Hall? If so… ” She placed a slender finger, the nail trimmed down to the quick, on her cheek. “I have some sartorial issues, I must say.”
“Oh crap.” Middleton put away the weapon and Leonora Tesla followed suit, if a little more slowly. He slapped his forehead theatrically. “I’m sorry, Felicia. We saw there was someone inside. I forgot you had the keys.”
“They shoot burglars in London, Harold? Such a beautiful little house. You don’t remember who you lend it to?”
Middleton glanced at the woman with him. “I said Felicia was welcome to use the place. For her… ” He stumbled over the details.
“… for my debut at the Wigmore Hall,” Felicia repeated, picking up the fiddle and showing it to them. “I thought you wanted to see me play this. It cost you a lot of money.”
Harold Middleton-she refused to shorten his first name since she wasn’t, Felicia wished to say, a colleague- had proved a good friend of sorts. He saved her life on more than one occasion when she was enmeshed in the deadly game of terror and crime that should have ended in a massacre at the James Madison Recital Hall in Washington, D.C., while she performed as the principal soloist for a newly unearthed work by Chopin.
There had been many more favors in the intervening two years. Over that time she ceased to be an impoverished young Polish emigre, without friends at first, without parents, and had began slowly to adjust to the life of a professional musician, taking the first steps on the international orchestral ladder, occasionally and only when absolutely necessary, using Harold Middleton’s many connections. She was grateful. She was also intensely aware that a part of his generosity stemmed from some private, inward guilt for introducing her to the dark and violent world to which he had now returned, one a million miles away from the music which he truly loved.
“I will see you play,” Middleton insisted.
“We both will, Felicia,” Leonora Tesla added.
Middleton winced when he failed to remember the date of the recital.
“Tonight,” she interrupted with a scowl. “Seven o’clock. I texted you. I emailed… ”
“I’m sorry. Give me time, please. Life’s a little… ”-he exchanged looks with his colleague-“… hectic right now.”
Middleton strode over to the tall wardrobe in the living room, a hulking, ugly piece of furniture-the only out- of-place item in the room and one hidden in shadow so that it couldn’t be seen from the long double window that gave out onto the street. The cottage was in a narrow Georgian lane in a backwater of Bloomsbury, walking distance from the West End and the concert hall where she was due that afternoon for a final rehearsal. It was a quiet, discreetly wealthy part of central London away from the crowds and the tourists, a village almost.
