The Memorist

by M. J. Rose

  The chairman of the ISTA conference, Stan Miller, sneaked a look at his watch. It wasn’t that he wasn’t enjoying the music; he was. Every aspect of this concert had been sublime, from the conductor’s powerful emotional virtuoso performance to each orchestra member’s flawless playing. This evening, coming at the end of a grueling four-day conference, was truly a celebration of how far ISTA had come in the post-9/11 years in instituting new security measures. But he didn’t feel well. Something he’d eaten at the dinner wasn’t agreeing with him. He’d popped heartburn pills before the lights had dimmed but they didn’t seem to be doing a very good job. Trying to refocus his thinking away from the fire in his chest, he examined the faces of the orchestra members.

  Two rows behind him, Gerta Osborne, a well-known and celebrated Austrian opera singer, felt the large diamond earrings pinching her earlobes and cursed that she couldn’t take them off. Beside her, the lovely young tenor she’d brought with her sensed her discomfort and turned to smile at her. She delighted in the gossip that she’d taken him for a lover—gossip he’d perpetrated even though it wasn’t true because it made the spotlight shine on him. And that could only be good for his career. Gerta knew that and took advantage of it. It was only good for her career, too. She was seventy-four and he was forty years her junior. The idea was delicious and fit her larger-than-life image.

  As the head of the American National Security Commission, Edward Fields knew this conference was a very important event and felt it had gone well. He’d been impressed by some of the new concepts in security that he’d seen. The only fly in the ointment was the woman sitting beside him. All he wanted to do was pull Ellen Grant’s icy blond hair out of that French twist and unbutton her severe black evening suit. He found it unbearable that this was going to be their last night together before he went home to Washington and his wife, and Ellen went home to her family in California.

  Dr. Erika Alderman sat next to Fremont Brecht, who had invited her to the concert. His invitations were among the few she ever accepted anymore. Relationships, family, food, hobbies—everything in her life had been subordinated to her research. She fell asleep worrying about it and woke up to the last thought she’d had before she’d closed her eyes. But when Fremont invited her to concerts she always said yes. Not because she enjoyed the music—in truth she found listening to music tedious—but she was fascinated watching the people around her being affected by what they were listening to. How they relaxed and their body language changed as the music cast its spell over them was research. A concert like tonight was an experiment—albeit on a larger scale than she was used to—and with better-dressed subjects than she typically worked with.

  Malachai Samuels tried to enjoy the concert but was preoccupied by the two empty seats beside him. He hadn’t heard from Meer since yesterday when they’d been separated in the Rathaus garden and no one had contacted him with any information on where Jeremy Logan had gone or with whom, even though Inspector Kalfus, whom Malachai had talked to that morning had taken his cell phone number and assured him that he would be in touch.

  By five that afternoon he’d become frantic. For hours he’d been calling Meer on her cell and Jeremy on his, but neither of them answered. He’d finally called the inspector but had only reached his voice mail. He’d left a message but that did nothing to alleviate his panic. Where was Jeremy? Meer? Did Meer still have the flute? There was only one person who might know but Malachai didn’t have any way to get in touch with Sebastian Otto, except to come to the concert and talk to him when it was over. So he’d changed into his tuxedo and used the ticket that Otto had supplied him with earlier in the week, and here he was.

  Chapter 90

  Thursday, May 1st—7:51 p.m.

  At the door to the concert hall the Global Inc. security officers had stopped Meer and the two city inspectors accompanying her and for the last ten minutes two men in one set of uniforms argued with two men in another set. Every minute that went by brought them closer to the end of the second movement. Meer knew there was an oboe solo coming up in the third movement. She’d remembered him telling her that the nurses at Steinhof always played his concerts for Nicolas. That had to be his plan. To play the flute during his solo so Nicolas would hear it in his room.

  “What’s taking so long?” she asked Fiske, urgently.

  “They won’t let us in without top-level confirmation of who we are.” He was furious. “The security for this event is so tight, not even police are allowed in.”

  “We can’t get in?” There was panic in her voice. “Does that mean there are no police inside?”

  “No. There are police inside. And more outside.” He gestured to the vestibule and the mantrap. “It’s us getting inside that’s an issue. Or convincing anyone here that there is a reason to interrupt the concert in order to prevent a member of the Philharmonic from playing a flute. Their position is that they will detain him after the concert. It’s hard to argue with them, Fräulein Logan.”

  “We need to stop him from playing,” Meer insisted. What had Malachai told her once? The past lives you remember first are those that ended in the most violence or tragedy. If Sebastian played the music for all the people in the hall it could be horrific. She explained this as quickly as she could to Fiske, but he only nodded, unconvinced, she knew.

  “No one can go in without special numbered holographic tickets and your name appearing on the master list,” he told her.

  “But my name should be there. Sebastian invited me. My father and I stopped by late Monday afternoon to be verified. Tell them that.”

  Before he could, the security guard responded to Meer with a proper British accent. “Miss Logan, I do have your name here and I have a copy of your United States passport—all I need now is your ticket.”

  Pulling out her wallet, Meer searched but it wasn’t there. Had Sebastian also taken this while she was in the shower? She looked up to explain and was momentarily distracted by the scene on the closed-circuit television to the right of the mantrap showing the full orchestra in a close shot. Meer had no trouble picking out Sebastian. He played with an expression of intensity she remembered from her years at Juilliard. He was one with his instrument, no boundaries between him and the oboe. There was no past and no future now, no memory except for memory of the notes. His heart wasn’t beating to its own rhythm anymore but to the beat of the symphony.

  “I don’t have my ticket,” Meer told Fiske. “I forgot…my father had both of them. Do you have his wallet?”

  “No.”

  “The medic took it out of his pocket in the tunnel—didn’t she give it to you?”

  “No, but let me see what I can do.”

  Fiske hurried over to Krantz, who listened and headed outside. Less than two minutes later he was back. First he gave Meer Jeremy’s watch, which she slipped on and felt the cold stainless steel embrace her wrist. Then he handed her a brown leather wallet, its edges worn to unraveling, its compartments bursting with cards and slips of paper and split at the seam. Why would he have such an old…and then she realized she’d given him this wallet for his birthday the year she was twelve, the last year he’d lived at home. Her mother had taken her shopping at T. Anthony on Park Avenue and waited patiently while Meer inspected all the different styles before choosing this one. That night at dinner, Jeremy unwrapped his gift, thanked her with a kiss and promised her it would go around the world with him. That he’d always have her with him because he’d have her gift with him. Always with him. Until today.

  Glancing up at the closed-circuit television again Meer concentrated to find where in the score they were. It would be time for the oboe solo in eight or nine minutes. Opening the wallet, she searched through the bills, the credit cards, then started on the bits of paper, startled by a photograph of a little girl sitting at a grand piano, a beatific smile on her face. The edges of the photograph, like the wallet itself, were worn away. Shoving it in her jeans pocket she kept looking, until she finally found the small
pristine white envelope with the name of the concert hall printed in the corner.

  “Here.” She thrust one of the holographic tickets at the guard.

  “Your name?”

  “I already gave you my name. Please, this is urgent.”

  “There’s protocol that—”

  “Meer Logan,” she said.

  Glancing at her father’s watch, seeing the seconds pass, listening to the symphony, she figured there was now less than five minutes before the oboe solo. Before Sebastian was going to take the irrevocable step of putting the ancient flute up to his lips, play a simple string of notes and possibly send God knows how many people into a maelstrom of fear and grief and tortured memory without any preparation or warning.

  “Please hurry!” Meer begged the guard and then heard a sound ominous only to her: the last section before the solo. At this rate she wasn’t going to make it in time to stop Sebastian.

  Chapter 91

  Thursday, May 1st—8:01 p.m.

  “David Yalom hasn’t made any phone calls from his hotel room or ordered any room service since yesterday afternoon. The manager at the hotel finally called me back. He had to track down the head of housekeeping to get the reports. His ‘do not disturb’ sign has been on the door since about two in the afternoon when he also left a ‘do not call’ order on his phone,” Kerri reported.

  “That’s not good news. Call the police. Ask them to check out his room ASAP,” Paxton said. “He could still be there. Hurt or worse.”

  “The symphony will be over in less than a half hour—” Kerri started.

  “I’m not sure this has anything to do with the symphony,” Paxton interrupted, “but the man is on a known terrorist hit list and we might be the only people who know he’s missing.”

  She nodded and opened her phone.

  Paxton looked around for Vine but didn’t see him. Hurrying out of the makeshift office he found his number two man monitoring a checkpoint at the end of the hall near the stage entrance.

  “Where’s Tucker Davis?” Paxton asked Vine.

  “Supervising all the teams we have crawling through those fucking underground labyrinths.”

  “Good. We’ve got less than twenty minutes left to this symphony and I want them working till the last round of applause,” he whispered so as not to alert anyone nearby. He knew all too well how easy it was to start a panic and that was the last thing he wanted in an enclosed space holding over two thousand people. But even more important, he was concerned about image management. He didn’t want anyone from ISTA thinking he wasn’t completely in control.

  “All the activity they’ve identified is related to an infestation of rats that live—”

  “Fuck the rats,” Paxton interrupted. “I know this is a long shot and I know there are miles of tunnels down there but we have Semtex missing and a reporter missing. If David Yalom is being held hostage under this venue, we need to know about it and empty out the theater fast.”

  Chapter 92

  Thursday, May 1st—8:02 p.m.

  On the stage Sebastian, holding his oboe with one hand, reached inside his tuxedo jacket with the other and extracted a small, fragile instrument from his pocket. The orchestra was playing the last measures before his solo. No one was yet focused on him. Unobtrusively lowering the oboe to the floor, he brought the flute up to his lips, waited a beat and then looked up and over at Leopold Twitchel.

  In deference to the conductor, he’d start at the right moment; give the maestro and Beethoven that much respect.

  Twitchel pointed his ivory baton at Sebastian and as it quivered in the air, his eyes narrowed. Sebastian knew he’d noticed the absence of the silver-and-black instrument he expected. Arching his eyebrows, Twitchel silently questioned his principal oboist.

  Sebastian ignored the conductor’s glance. He no longer cared what his maestro thought. Focused on another goal, he only cared that the thousand euros he’d promised the male nurse at the Steinhof hospital when he called him earlier were enough to ensure that the radio in his son’s room was on as usual and tuned to the station carrying this symphony in its entirety, and that what he was about to play would reach Nicolas’s ears. The flute felt brittle in his hands. Dry against his lips. Positioning his fingers he pictured the notes he’d written on the staff as Meer had dictated them.

  Chapter 93

  Thursday, May 1st—8:03 p.m.

  David watched as a brick fell out, a crack in the airshaft opened wider and a substantial splash of light spilled in. Flattening himself against the wall, protected by an outcropping of stone, he watched as another brick fell. And then another. As much as he’d prepared for this, he was still caught off guard. David had never believed in the inviolability of this crypt. But none of that mattered now. He still had time and surprise on his side, even if they did break through and find the chamber.

  Trying not to breathe or make any noise, David carefully and slowly moved his explosives out of the path of light. Inch by inch, he pulled each component back into a darker corner of the crypt.

  “Don’t move,” a man shouted. “I have a gun.”

  David had timed his efforts to the perfect moment in the symphony but could he wait that long? Holding his breath, he listened to the Americans who’d broken through the brick cistern on the far side of his hiding place. Everything would be decided in a matter of minutes…it all depended on his last decoy.

  “I have a gun!” the American shouted again. “Don’t move.”

  Releasing the remaining rat in the cage and cursing himself for not catching more of them, David watched the rodent scurry across the rutted dirt ground.

  “Damn it, Tucker. It’s just more of those damn rats,” another voice shouted.

  A beam of light caught the rodent as it darted to the west wall and slipped through a crack.

  “I think we should head back up. This is a wild-goose chase,” the man said.

  “Wild rat chase,” the other joked.

  Laughter between the men echoed in the chamber but it seemed slightly farther away. Were they retreating? It sounded like they might be. David sat in the dark and listened intensely. He wasn’t sure how long it took for the men to leave because from his hiding place he couldn’t see anything and the music overwhelmed the now faint sounds the two men made. The question was should he wait for his marker in the fourth movement or do this now? Could he still afford to wait? What if Paxton’s men hadn’t given up? What if they were just lingering? To be this close to his goal and fail because he wanted an elegant ending—wanted to detonate the device precisely at the end of the concert… Did that make sense? No, there was no reason to hold off. He reached out for the wires.

  Chapter 94

  Thursday, May 1st—8:04 p.m.

  As soon as Meer arrived at the auditorium’s entrance the usher stepped in front of her, barring the way. Ignoring him, not caring that he was trying to stop her, not giving a damn about interrupting the concert, she reached for the door handle with authority. But of course he put his hand out, keeping the door closed and in a hushed but harsh tone informed her she couldn’t enter during a performance.

  She knew that. It distracted musicians. Any movement once the concert was in progress could throw a performer off track. But that’s exactly what she wanted to do. Listening to the man responsible for her father’s death, Meer heard him blow the first note of the song that had been haunting her since she was a child. An ancient and strange sound filled the auditorium. The vibrations reverberated off the walls and ceiling, dazzling and absorbing. Otherworldly. Not music. Not noise. Not anything anyone had ever heard. And it was affecting her.

  Dizzy, Meer put her hands up to her ears, trying but failing to block the sound. Swaying, she fought to regain balance. Her bag slipped from her shoulder, its contents spilling out on the carpet. Bending over, she began retrieving the items and, courteous despite himself, the usher leaned over to help her. Which was just what she’d counted on.

  Taking advantage of h
is kindness, Meer straightened up and quickly lunged for the door. She opened it, slipped inside and sprinted toward the stage.

  Chapter 95

  Thursday, May 1st—8:07 p.m.

  Few audience members guessed anything was occurring, but the orchestra knew something was awry. The conductor—baton in midair—was immobile. Never at a loss on a stage before, Twitchel simply stared at Sebastian while he debated what path to take, surprised to feel a wave of sadness overtake him.

  The floor below Twitchel was dissolving. He wasn’t on solid ground at all anymore but was treading water. Icy, cold, black water under a black sky. No moon. No stars. Around him, pieces of his ship floated by: broken pieces, broken lives. Screams came from close and far away. As captain of the ship he was responsible for their crossing and now he’d be responsible for their deaths. The cries of the passengers slipped into a pattern; their terror was its own song, music he knew he would hear throughout eternity. The freezing water was turning warm; his limbs were too heavy. He wouldn’t mind drowning, he thought, as long as he didn’t have to hear the horrific symphony of screams anymore.

  As Meer edged up to the stage her vision went in and out of focus and the dark auditorium phased into a night sky.

  Margaux could smell her horse, the pine trees and the fresh scent of the rain. The wind was blowing so hard Beethoven’s borrowed hat had flown off and her hair whipped her face, stinging her skin. His coat, soaked through with cold rain, was heavy on her shoulders now. Just hours ago, the disguise had seemed like such a good idea.

  Archer Wells was as wet as she was and was breathing heavily—at least she had the satisfaction of making him work to catch up with her.