The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller

by Jeffery Deaver

  “Excuse me, Agent Connolly. He ID’d the shooter based on what?”

  “Surveillance video taken at Dulles.”

  “Ah. So Inspector Padlo viewed the video, then?”

  She faltered. “No. I did. But Padlo made a positive ID based on my verbal description to him.”

  “Your…verbal description,” Kalmbach echoed softly. Condescension dripped from every word.

  “In fact—” she began, but Kalmbach cut her off.

  “Do you understand how complex and involved the process is by which a foreign law enforcement official is granted entry into the United States? It involves weeks of legal findings and sworn affidavits by the DOJ’s Criminal Division, the Office of International Affairs. It’s a cumbersome and extremely sensitive legal affair and not one to be taken lightly. For one thing, there must be absolutely incontrovertible evidence of dual criminality.”

  Oh, for God’s sake, she thought. The guy lived and breathed paperwork. It was a wonder he hadn’t already died of white lung. “Sir, if Padlo’s right then, those three homicides in Warsaw are tied to these police shootings at Dulles Airport and we’ve got a clear-cut case of dual criminality.”

  “A case built on a verbal description over the telephone, Agent Connolly? I hardly think that constitutes a finding of dual criminality. This is an awfully slender reed. I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to grant a visa to Inspector Padlo.”

  Yeah, she thought. If Jozef wanted to get into the country quick and easy, no questions asked, he should just join Al Qaeda and enroll in flight school. We’d let him in without a second look.

  But she said, “So you’re saying that if we had a clear-cut ID of the shooter—connecting the Warsaw homicides to the Dulles ones—you’d have no problem letting Padlo in?”

  “We don’t have that, do we?” Kalmbach said acidly.

  “No, sir,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “Thank you, Agent…Marion.”

  “M.T.,” she said.

  But he’d hung up.

  She’d been M.T. since the age of thirteen.

  She’d always hated her given name, “Marion.” Her father had also been Marion; but then, as he was always proud to point out, that was John Wayne’s real name. In Gulfport, Mississippi, where Dad had been a part-time deputy in the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department, the Duke was up there with Jesus Christ. Bigger, to some folks.

  But to her, “Marion” was either a librarian or a housewife in a TV sitcom, and neither fit her self-image. She was a tomboy and proud of it. As tough as any boy, she had even beat up the seventh-grade class bully for daring to call her adored younger brother Wayne a “sissy.”

  So she insisted on being called by her initials, which to her ears sounded tough and no-nonsense and the exact opposite of girly-girl. Maybe even a little enigmatic.

  Over the years, she’d learned about makeup, and she’d developed a pretty damned nice figure, and she worked out every morning at five for at least an hour. When she wanted to look hot, she could. And she knew that when she put on that slinky red jersey halter dress from Banana Republic she always drew appreciative glances from men.

  At work, though, she downplayed her femininity as much as possible. The FBI was still a boys’ club, and she was convinced that the guys took you a lot more seriously if you didn’t arouse their libidos.

  Like the guy who sat across from her right now. His name was Bruce Ardsley, and he was a forensic video analyst with the Bureau’s Forensic Audio, Video, and Image Analysis Unit. The main FBI lab was in D.C., in the Hoover building, but they’d recently installed an outpost here because of all the demand on the Bureau since 9/11.

  Ardsley wore thick aviator-frame glasses and had greasy hair and long bushy sideburns that might have been modish in the Swinging ‘70s, and he was notorious for trying to hit on all the female agents and administrative assistants. But he’d given up on her long ago. Now they got along fine.

  His office, in the basement of the new resident agency building, was no bigger than a closet, jammed with steel shelves heaped with video monitors and digital editing decks and CPUs. Taped to one wall was a mangled poster of a man running up a stadium steps. Above his blurred figure was the word PERSISTENCE. At his feet it said, “There is no GIANT step that does it. It’s a lot of LITTLE steps.”

  She handed Ardsley two disks. “The one marked Dulles is from Dulles Airport,” Connolly said.

  “Clever.”

  She smiled. “The other has the photos from Warsaw.” As he promised, Padlo had e-mailed her photos of Agim Rugova’s henchmen. One of them was Dragan Stefanovic, the man Padlo thought might be the Dulles shooter who’d tried to kill Harold Middleton. Stefanovic had served under Agim Rugova, which made him a war criminal at the very least. After the war, Padlo said, he’d become a mercenary and had gone into hiding.

  “High-def, I hope.”

  “I doubt it,” she replied.

  “Well, all I can do is my best,” Ardsley said. “At least one thing in our favor is the new networked digital-video surveillance system at Dulles. The airports authority dumped a boatload of money on this a couple years ago. Bought a bunch of high-priced Nextiva S2600e wide-dynamic range IP cameras with on-board analytical software-based solutions.”

  “Translation, please,” said Connolly.

  “Meaning the facial-recognition software is still crap and the images are still fuzzy, but now we can all feel good about how much money we’re throwing at the terrorists.”

  “And that’s in our favor…how exactly?” she asked.

  He pointed to the steel shelves lined with video monitors. “Once the Bureau realized how crappy the facial-recognition system is, they were forced to sink more money into toys for boys like me to play with. Remember the Super Bowl?”

  She groaned. The FBI had put in an extensive surveillance system at the Super Bowl in Tampa in 2001 in order to scan the faces of everyone passing through the turnstiles and match them against the images of known terrorists. The ACLU pitched a fit—this was before 9/11, when people listened to the ACLU—but the whole scheme was a resounding flop anyway. The Bureau had rounded up a couple of scalpers and that was it. “You’re telling me the technology’s no better now?”

  “Oh, it’s better,” Ardsley said. “Well, a little better.”

  Her phone chirped, and she excused herself and stepped out into the hallway.

  “Connolly.”

  “Hey, M.T., it’s Tanya Jackson in Technical Services.”

  “That was fast,” she said. “You got something?”

  She’d called the FBI’s Technical Services unit and asked them to run a locater on Middleton’s cell phone to find out where he was at that very instant. Most cell phones these days, she knew, contained GPS chips that enabled you to pinpoint its location to within a hundred meters, as long as it was turned on and transmitting a signal.

  “Well, not exactly,” Jackson said. “There’s sort of a procedural problem.”

  “Procedural…?”

  “Look, M.T.,” Jackson said apologetically, “you know we’re no longer allowed to track cell phone users without a court order.”

  “Oh, is that right?” Connolly said innocently. Of course, she knew all about the recent rulings. Now you had to get a court order to compel a wireless carrier to reveal the location of one of their cell phones. And to get a court order, you had to demonstrate that a crime was in progress or had occurred.

  But Jackson had done her favors before. She’d located cell phones for Connolly without the necessary paperwork. Why did she all of a sudden care about the legal niceties?

  “Tanya,” she said, “what’s going on?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “You’re getting heat on this, aren’t you?” Connolly said.

  Another beat of silence, and then Jackson said, “Five minutes after you called me, I heard from someone pretty high up in the Bureau. He reminded me that it was a felony for me to locate a
cell phone without a court order. I could go to jail.”

  “I’m sorry I put you in that position,” Connolly said.

  “I just wanted you to understand.”

  “Tanya,” Connolly said. “Was it Emmett Kalmbach, by any chance?”

  “I—I can’t answer that,” Jackson said.

  But she didn’t have to.

  “You’re in luck,” Bruce Ardsley said. He was beaming.

  “Dragan Stefanovic is the shooter?”

  He nodded.

  “How certain can you be?”

  “Ninety-seven percent probability of true verification.”

  “Bruce, that’s fantastic.” Take that, Kalmbach, she thought.

  “The probability on the other one’s lower, though.”

  “The other one?”

  “Maybe seventy-eight percent probability.”

  “Which other one are you talking about?”

  Ardsley swiveled around in his chair, tapped at a keyboard, and a large photographic image came up on the flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall in front of her. It was a close-up of a dark-haired man in his 40s wearing a dark, expensive-looking business suit. He had flat, Slavic facial features.

  “Where was this taken?”

  “A surveillance camera outside a men’s room in Concourse D at Dulles.”

  “Who is it?” she said.

  “Nigel Sedgwick.”

  “Who?”

  Ardsley struck another key, and a second photo popped onto the screen next to the first.

  “A British businessman. From Bromsgrove, in Worcestershire. That’s England. Or so his passport said. Here in D.C. on a buying trip for his hot-tub business.”

  “Looks like it was taken at passport control,” she said.

  Ardsley turned around, shrugged modestly, smiled. “Right.”

  “How’d you get it?”

  “I hacked into Homeland Security. Well, not hacked, really. Just used a backdoor into Customs and Border Protection’s database.”

  “So who is this guy really?”

  A third image appeared on the screen next to the other two. She immediately recognized the photo as one of the mug shots of Agim Rugova’s men that Padlo had e-mailed her.

  “Vukasin,” she said.

  “He entered the country last night on a British Airways flight from Paris. Using a British passport.”

  Connolly nodded. “I guess Homeland Security doesn’t have facial-recognition software, huh? Or they’d have stopped him.”

  “Oh, they have the software, believe me,” he said. “Plus, this guy Vukasin is on one of their watch lists.”

  “Maybe their software isn’t as good as ours.”

  “Or maybe someone knew who he was and let him in anyway.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

  “A lot of what Homeland Security does makes no sense,” Ardsley said.

  “What are you saying—you think he was flagged as a bad guy but let through anyway?”

  “Yes,” Ardsley said. “That’s what I think. But I’m only a video tech, so what do I know?”

  “Jesus,” she breathed.

  “So let me ask you something,” he said.

  She turned away from the flat-screen. “Go ahead.”

  “You ever free for a drink?”

  “You don’t give up, do you?” Connolly said.

  He pointed at the ripped motivational poster on the wall. “Persistence,” he said with a sheepish smile.

  As Connolly approached her cubicle, she saw from a distance that a man was sitting in her chair. Another man was standing next to him.

  The man in the chair was Emmett Kalmbach. The man standing beside him was tall and wiry, with horn-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline. She had no idea who he was.

  Then the standing man noticed her, muttered something, and Kalmbach turned slowly around.

  “Agent Connolly,” Kalmbach said, getting to his feet. “Allow me to introduce Richard Chambers from DHS.”

  She shook hands with the man in the horn-rimmed glasses. His handshake was cold and limp.

  “Dick Chambers,” the man said. He didn’t smile.

  “M.T. Connolly.”

  “Dick is a Regional Director of Homeland Security,” Kalmbach said.

  “A pleasure to meet you.” Connolly kept her tone and face neutral, as if she’d never heard of him. But in fact she had. His background was almost clichéd diplomatic track: Yale, OCS, and then State Department. He’d been posted to some of the worst hotspots in the world. After September 11, he’d gone to Homeland Security, resolved that no terrorist would ever show his face in the Mid-Atlantic region of the country. Chambers wasn’t popular among the feds–an abrasive façade over an ego that wouldn’t quit–but he was a man who took on fires that nobody else wanted to go near. And, without any hesitation to risk his own hide, he got them extinguished. That he was involved made her uneasy. Real uneasy. “Now will someone explain to me what’s going on?” she asked.

  “We can talk in the conference room,” Kalmbach said.

  “Agent Connolly,” the man from Homeland Security said, “we seem to have a communications problem that I hope we can all work out in person.” He’d taken a seat at the head of the mahogany conference table, wordlessly indicating his place in the hierarchy.

  “What sort of ‘communication problem’?” she asked.

  “Agent Connolly,” Kalmbach said, “what happened at Dulles Airport falls cleanly within the jurisdiction of the Virginia police. I thought I made it clear that the situation there is of no concern to the Bureau.”

  That wasn’t what he’d said, of course. He seemed to be performing for the man from DHS. But she knew better than to argue with Emmett Kalmbach over what he had or had not told her.

  “Actually,” Connolly said, holding up the CD that Bruce Ardsley had made for her, “I think it’s very much of concern to the Bureau. Our own facial-recognition software has identified two Serbian war criminals who’ve entered the country illegally, one of them using a false British passport under the name—”

  “Why are you trying to locate Harold Middleton?” Chambers interrupted, taking the disk from her hand.

  “Because he’s a material witness,” Connolly said. “In an international case that involves a triple homicide in Warsaw, and another one, or possibly by now two—”

  “Was I not absolutely clear?” Kalmbach said, his face flushing, but the DHS man put a hand on Kalmbach’s sleeve, apparently to silence him.

  “Agent Connolly,” Chambers said softly, “Harold Middleton’s file is blue-striped.”

  She looked at him, then nodded. A blue stripe indicated that a file was sealed for national-security reasons. Part of Middleton’s military record had been designated as codeword-classified. That meant a level above even top secret.

  “Why?” she asked finally.

  Kalmbach scowled and said nothing. The man from Homeland replied, “How do I put this in a language you’ll understand? This is above your pay grade, Agent Connolly.”

  “Meaning I’m off the case?” she blurted out.

  “No, Agent Connolly,” Chambers said. “Meaning that there is no case.”

  Chapter Ten

  Jim Fusilli

  Leonora Tesla stepped out of the yellow taxi on the busy northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 35th Street, and hustled into Macy’s. She emerged with her hair trimmed short and punked, wearing a black button-down blouse with the collar curled high, black slacks and black flats–in many ways, the opposite of what she wore 24 hours earlier when she killed Günter Schmidt. A new black-leather shoulder bag, tucked tight under her arm, held a change of underwear and what remained from the moment she steered Schmidt’s body toward the ravaging hyenas down in the wadi: her sunglasses, cash, credit cards and passport, her portfolio and her most valued possession, her fully loaded iPod, a gift from Harold Middleton.

  She called the Human Rights Observer from a payphone in Herald Square. An inte
rn answered and told her Val Brocco hadn’t come in. A flu, she reported; his message said he intended to spend a second day in bed. Tesla decided against giving her name and demanding his latest cell number, consoling herself with the thought that Brocco’s bordering-on-obsessive sense of precaution might serve him well. It’d better: To find Middleton, they’d tried to kill her, sending an agent to Namibia for the task. No doubt then already had at least one agent in metro D.C., where Middleton and Brocco were based.

  Next, from the lobby of Madison Square Garden, she tried Jean-Marc Lespasse in Parkwood, North Carolina. Mr. Lespasse, she was told, was no longer with TDD–Technologie de Demain, the company he founded. And, no, the receptionist added tersely, there’s no forwarding information. Sure enough, the last cell number Tesla had for Lespasse was no longer active.

  Downstairs into Penn Station, Tesla paid cash for a one-way ticket on the Acela Express to Washington’s Union Station, though she planned to get off in Delaware. Checking the overhead Departure board, she saw she had enough time to run to the newsstand for a pre-paid cell phone and an array of domestic and international newspapers for the two-hour train ride to Wilmington.

  As she gathered her change, she looked up. There, on a TV above a rack of batteries and disposable cameras, was a grainy video of a gun battle at Dulles Airport. “Two Cops Killed,” the zipper reported.

  “Harold,” she said, the word escaping before she realized it had.

  She stared at the soundless newscast. The zipper under the video now told her the gunman hadn’t yet been found.

  For some reason, she took it as verification that he was still alive.

  She wondered if the same could be said of Lespasse and, maybe, Brocco.

  Twelve hours earlier, Harold Middleton left the St. Regis Hotel with the sadist Eleana Soberski on his arm and a Zastava P25 in his ribs. As he and Soberski walked west along K Street, they seemed like the kind of couple not unknown in the neighborhood: a disheveled middle-aged man in a business suit, briefcase swinging at the end of his fist, and an upscale hooker exuding cold impenetrability. Except they were moving away from a four-star hotel rather than toward one for a $500 an hour “date.”