by M. J. Rose
Chapter 73
Thursday, May 1st—9:39 a.m.
“I have some bad news,” Bill Vine said as he rushed into the makeshift office at the concert hall, slamming the door behind him.
Paxton stood up, ready to spring into action.
“The signal we’ve been tracking out of the Czech Republic, to Vienna and then to Durnstein has been taking us on a joyride. Apparently our buyer found the little gift we put on the knapsack and attached it to the underside of a car belonging to a couple from St. Mary’s, Georgia, who had the bad luck to visit the Moravsky Krumlov on Monday. He’s a lawyer and would-be novelist; she’s a Mary Kay executive. We’ve run them through every computer system we have and they are who they say they are with no connections to any known terrorist group. She grew up in St. Mary’s and her family practically owns the town. He’s been on the city council for ten years. Brother, are they brand-spanking clean.”
“So now we know the tracking device was on a holiday and the device we lost in the subway was the damn Semtex,” Paxton said. “And we still don’t have a clue where that disappeared to, do we?”
It was a rhetorical question. They’d been obsessed with locating it since it dropped off the radar two days before and everyone knew they didn’t have any idea where the Semtex was.
“I thought we were using a global positioning system that would prevent this very thing from happening. You guaranteed it.”
“As long as the tracking device wasn’t taken out of range.”
“Well, how did someone get it so fucking high in the sky or deep in the ocean that we didn’t watch him on his way there to do it? Where’s the device, Bill?”
“We don’t care anymore.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“We’re wasting time now, Tom. It doesn’t matter where the hell the device is, we can’t find it. We can’t waste time looking for it. All we have time to worry about now is that no one with that block of Semtex winds up in the vicinity of this building.”
Paxton glowered at his employee. “And what are we doing to make sure that isn’t happening? We’re going to have top brass from twenty-five countries and every branch of our own government including the fucking Vice President—”
“We’re fine,” Bill interrupted. “We’re in good shape. We’ve had men combing through the tunnels under this place for days and have air traffic control on alert. We’ve doubled the teams. If anyone’s above us or below us, we’ll find them.”
Chapter 74
Thursday, May 1st—10:00 a.m.
While the hot water beat down on her, Meer played the elusive music in her mind. After a lifetime of not being able to grab hold of it, now she couldn’t let it go. Seemingly disparate information connected the flute’s music to the rest of her life, almost as proof that she was meant to make this discovery one day.
She remembered being in the hospital after the spinal fusion and her father showing her a book with a drawing of the Tree of Life in it. All circles. Had all of these circles separated by thousands of years come together for her now? And why her?
She quickly finished washing her hair with the hotel-provided shampoo. She wanted to get to the hospital as fast as she could and talk to her father and have him explain some of those lessons she’d always been too busy for. Stepping out of the shower stall, she put on one of the hotel’s thick bathrobes and wrapped a towel around her head.
“I’m anxious to get out of here—” she was saying when she walked into the suite’s living room expecting to find Sebastian eating his breakfast. But he wasn’t there.
She walked over toward the open bedroom door and stood outside.
“Sebastian?”
No answer.
Maybe he’d gone downstairs to pay the bill, to arrange for a car, for any one of a hundred reasons. Tightening the belt around the robe, she padded back into the bathroom to finish drying her hair and get dressed, playing a childish game with herself: when she finished and went back outside he’d be there.
Chapter 75
Thursday, May 1st—10:20 a.m.
Malachai walked out of the restaurant, walked the five steps to the front of the hotel, nodded to the doorman and waited while he hailed a cab.
Following at a safe distance, neither Kalfus nor Lucian was surprised when they arrived at the hospital.
They’d just settled in for another interminable wait when Malachai came back outside after only five short minutes, looking distraught and confused. It was the first time Lucian had seen him with his mask askew and not in total control.
“Something’s up. Call the floor. Find out if Logan’s all right.”
Malachai was just getting into a taxi when Kalfus said, “Jeremy Logan left the hospital about ten minutes ago against his doctor’s orders.”
“Was he alone?”
“No, he was accompanied by a man.”
“And from the looks of it Malachai didn’t know a thing about it and was expecting his friend to still be in his room. We have a problem, Alex. We’re going to need backup. We have to find Logan. Fast.”
Chapter 76
Thursday, May 1st—10:42 a.m.
Sebastian was still missing. None of the reasons Meer had come up with would explain why he’d been gone more than forty minutes. Unless, no…after everything he’d done for her… Something must have happened to him. Unless he was so angry she’d refused to play the memory song for him, he’d walked out in frustration and was sitting in some café stewing. So what should she do now? Go to the hospital on her own? She had Inspector Fiske’s card in her bag. Should she call him? No, not the police. What could she tell him he’d even believe? Besides, he might want to take the flute away from her as evidence and she couldn’t take that chance. Her father and Malachai had to see it before anyone else did. She’d ask the concierge to call her a taxi and go to the hospital.
Sitting down at the desk, Meer wrote Sebastian a note. Just a few lines, telling him where she was going. Then she started to take an inventory of the room—a habit of her mother’s she’d picked up—except she’d come here with nothing but what she wore and the pocketbook she carried. There wouldn’t be an errant bottle of cologne or vial of pills by the side of the bed. Everything she had that mattered was across the room on the piano bench where she’d left the flute beside her purse when she went to take a shower.
She bent to pick it up. Yes, the bag was there. But the flute wasn’t.
Maybe Sebastian had put it inside her pocketbook before he’d gone out in case housekeeping came in while she was showering. Frantically she emptied her bag onto the floor. But it wasn’t there either.
Halfheartedly she checked the rest of the room, almost certain the flute wasn’t going to be there and was in despair when the suite’s doorbell rang. She rushed toward the living room. As she reached the door she heard a man call out, “Fräulein Juska?”
It had to be Sebastian using the name they’d checked in with. He’d apologize and tell her where the flute was and explain that—
Meer jerked open the door without looking through the peephole. A man wearing a bellman’s uniform with the hotel’s insignia on his breast pocket held out an envelope. Suddenly Meer remembered Sebastian’s warning from the night before not to let anyone in, to be suspicious even past logic. This man might be the assailant, might have knocked out the real bellman, stolen his clothes—she slammed the door in his face and threw the lock, the clicking loud in her ears.
“No—please—I’m very sorry,” the man on the other side of the door said in awkward English. “Herr Juska asked me to deliver to you this note at ten-forty-five.”
“Will you…will you slip it under the door?”
“Certainly.”
Dear Meer,
Your father was going to have a procedure this afternoon. His heart’s worse than he’s let on and he was finally going to tell you when he saw you this morning…but he’s missing. No one knows where he is. It’s imperative he’s found
and returns to the hospital.
I think I know where he is but I need your help. Please, do what I ask without calling the police yet. Once I explain…then you can call them if you want. Come as soon as you can. Just walk to the taxi stand on the corner and give the driver the address: Engerthstrasse 122. Ring the bell when you get there. I will see you on the video camera to let you in. Hurry.
Sebastian
Chapter 77
Thursday, May 1st—11:22 a.m.
Standing across the street from the police station at Deutschmeisterplatz 3 on the busy Schottenring, Malachai weighed his options. He didn’t know what to do and that wasn’t a feeling he was used to. All he knew was that there was no way he could conduct a proper search for either Meer or Jeremy by himself. Not in a foreign country where he barely spoke the language. And there was no time to hire anyone. There was too much at stake to risk anything but a full-out effort with the local authorities. There were simply too many questions he didn’t have answers to.
Who else knew that Meer found the flute yesterday? And Jeremy? What had happened to his friend? Had he found out Meer was missing and checked himself out of the hospital to try to find her? He’d do anything to save his daughter; endangering himself wouldn’t be of any consequence. But who had he called? The nurse said he’d left with a man. Maybe Sebastian? But Sebastian wasn’t answering his cell phone.
Despite the traffic, few car horns honked and the morning was deceptively lovely. There were red and purple flowers in the pots in front of the clothing store next to the station house. On the other side of the street the early nineteenth century building showed off a sculptured frieze of Pan playing his pipe.
Everywhere in Vienna there were monuments to music. This particular one being on this particular corner would seem to be a coincidence to anyone else but not to him. He’d spent the last thirty years refuting coincidences.
If he didn’t walk across the street and through the large glass doors to file a report, he could be endangering both Jeremy’s and Meer’s lives. That they were both missing couldn’t be chance. But by making the report he would certainly be opening himself up to scrutiny he didn’t want. The circumstantial evidence would be against him yet again. It didn’t take a leap of imagination to construct the argument the FBI and Interpol would make: for the second time in less than a year an ancient artifact worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that could challenge the belief systems of millions of people and many scientific precepts had been stolen, and Malachai Samuels was not only at the scene of the crime again but was also a close friend of the missing persons involved.
Except weren’t there hundreds of people who would want the item besides him? He could name several himself. It wasn’t about money for Malachai and he doubted it was about money for whoever else was involved at this point. He knew the limits of his own conscience, but how far would the board of directors of the Memorist Society go to get the flute?
How badly did Fremont Brecht want to prove reincarnation? Last night he said he’d hired someone to find the gaming box but his contacts hadn’t been able to locate it yet. Was he lying? Had he found out that Meer had discovered the flute? Had he kidnapped her?
How desperate was Dr. Erika Alderman to prove the potential of binaural beats?
She’d been studying the idea of harmonic resonance for the last thirty years. He’d seen determination flare in her eyes last night when she talked about proving her theories and establishing her place in the scientific community.
And for all Malachai knew there were other Memorists he hadn’t met who coveted the flute. Certainly by now there were dozens of people who would know what he’d known all along: if there was any chance of the flute and the memory song being found, Meer Logan would be instrumental in that discovery. Conversely, if anything happened to her, any chances for access to the flute would disappear.
In his life, the opportunity to actually prove the existence of reincarnation would not come that many times. It had already slipped out of his grasp once. He couldn’t allow it to happen again. But willingly talking to the police?
He imagined Detective Barry Branch back at home smiling smugly at hearing the news. The baby-faced member of New York’s Finest who’d been the investigating officer on the memory stones case from the beginning would reopen that case, and Malachai would be under intense investigation once again. Except there was no evidence to use against him. None found to date. None that they would ever find.
The steel handle was cold to the touch and the glass door was heavier than he expected. Inside there was so much activity no one even noticed him until he’d been standing at the front desk more than five minutes. Finally, the officer on duty turned to him and, in rudimentary German, Malachai explained that he needed to talk to an inspector who could speak English.
Waiting on an uncomfortable wooden bench, Malachai pulled out a deck of cards and shuffled them, letting the slapping sound soothe him. Not paying attention to how many times he performed the activity, he went over and over what he would tell the police and what he’d keep to himself. It was important to be prepared and only give as much information as necessary.
The story he’d offer was that he’d come to Vienna to meet with his old friend Jeremy Logan and inspect the treasure Logan had found. As head of the Phoenix Foundation he had many reasons to do that.
The cards moved so quickly they blurred.
Maybe he shouldn’t stay. He wasn’t used to vacillating and was annoyed with himself that he was second-guessing his decision. Besides, having come this far, if he didn’t report Jeremy and Meer as missing and left now, it would be even more suspicious; he’d already given his name to the officer on duty. Clumsily he mixed the deck and the cards flew out of his hand and spilled onto the floor. The last thing he wanted to do was get down on his hands and knees and pick them up, but the only alternative was to leave them there like litter.
“Dr. Samuels? I’m Inspector Kalfus. You asked for someone who could speak English. How may I help you?”
Chapter 78
Thursday, May 1st—11:26 a.m.
Wipers swept back and forth on the taxi’s windshield, sluicing away the steady rain. Meer’s hands were clasped together so tightly she hurt herself. Nothing about the trip so far felt familiar until the driver turned the corner on to Engerthstrasse and up ahead, through the rain, she saw the stone columns of the Toller Archäologiegesellschaft.
Walking up the steps to the Memorist Society’s building, she saw a bright yellow sign affixed to the gate—it showed the symbol of a door with a large X through it. Despite the obvious do not enter warning and the fact that the Society didn’t open till after noon, Meer pressed the doorbell.
Thirty seconds passed. She pounded on the door. Sixty. She rang the bell again. Ninety seconds. Leaving her finger on the buzzer, Meer wondered how Sebastian knew where her father was. And why had Jeremy left the hospital if he needed a procedure? Would she and Sebastian find him in time? Her mind had been churning the same questions since she’d run out of the hotel.
Why wasn’t someone answering the door?
Suddenly a sickening thought occurred to her: she didn’t know Sebastian’s handwriting. Maybe the note wasn’t from him at all. What if the people who attacked her in the woods and knocked Sebastian out, who were probably responsible for stealing the Beethoven letter and the gaming box and for Ruth’s and Dr. Smettering’s deaths, were behind this ruse too? Maybe they had Sebastian and her father and the flute.
A creaking hinge alerted her as the door opened quickly, and before she could protest or look to see who it was an arm reached out and grabbed her, pulling her inside into a dark, shadowy foyer.
“Thank God it’s you. Is my father here?” she blurted out as soon as she saw that it was Sebastian.
“Yes.”
“Is he all right?”
“Yes, I’ll take you to him.”
Meer was skeptical.
“You’re sure he’s all right.”
<
br /> “Meer, he’s fine. I promise.” He looked right at her and she felt safe and then instantly frightened as if she were hearing two different beats, one in each ear.
“He’s this way.” He gestured to the gloomy interior and she followed him inside.
“The flute’s missing, Sebastian. Do you know where it is?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all? Yes?”
As they passed into the main room where it was even darker, Meer’s anxiety increased. The first time she’d come here with her father she’d had a toxic reaction; the air was rife with affliction and tragedy on Monday and it was worse today, so thick she thought she might choke on it.
“The flute’s safe. I’d never let anything happen to it.” His words echoed along with their footsteps on the marble floor.
“I don’t understand…why did you take it? And why did you leave without telling me?”
“There was no time to waste. I’m sorry about this. About everything.” There was so much pathos in his voice it broke through the alarm she was feeling.
As they left the inner sanctum and kept walking, Meer asked him why there was a no-entry sign outside the building.
“The majordomo received a call this morning that there might be a gas leak in the sub-basement so he alerted the staff and told them not to come in until notified.”
“There’s a gas leak and my father’s here?”
“I told you, he’s fine.”
They’d reached a large oak door that Sebastian held open for her. Stepping into the book-lined library she spun around, looking for Jeremy but saw only empty chairs, yards of carved wooden shelves, intricately patterned carpets, a suite of stained-glass windows.
“Where is he?”
