The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller

by Jeffery Deaver

  Sometimes the world was simply mad, Harry Middleton concluded.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jeffery Deaver

  The men finished the work at midnight.

  “I’m exhausted. Are we through?” The language was Serbo-Croatian.

  The second man was tired too but he said nothing and looked uneasily at the third, his face dark, his black hair long and swept back.

  The man who’d been supervising their handiwork—Faust–told them in a soft voice that, yes, it was all right to leave. He spoke in English.

  Once they were gone, he walked through the basement, using a flashlight to inspect what they’d spent the last four hours doing: Running two-inch hose–it was astonishingly heavy, who’d have thought?–through access tunnels from three buildings away. Painstakingly, using silent hand pumps, they’d filled rubber bladders with gasoline, a total of close to 900 gallons of the liquid. Next they placed propane tanks and detonators between the bladders and, most difficult of all, rigged the electronics.

  Alone now in the basement of the James Madison recital hall, Faust ran final diagnostic checks on the system. Everything was in order. He allowed himself a fantasy of what would happen later this evening. During the adagio movement at the world premier of the newly discovered Chopin sonata, a unique combination of notes would slip from the microphone above the soloist’s piano and be electronically translated into numerical values. These would be recognized by the computer controller as a command to small motors that would open the propane tanks. Then a few minutes later, when the score moved into the vivace movement, another combination of notes would trigger the detonators. The propane would flare, melt the bladders and turn the recital hall instantly into a crematorium.

  This elaborate system was necessary because radio, microwave and cell phone jammers were in use in security-minded public venues in D.C. Remote control devices were useless. And timing devices could be picked up in sweeps by supersensitive microphones. Ironically, Felicia Kaminski herself would be the detonator.

  Now Faust hid the bladders, tanks and wires behind boxes. He was satisfied with the plan. Middleton and the government had taken the bait Nowakowski offered them, the manuscript. And it was clear they believed the entire charade, all false information Faust had fed to Jack Perez and Felicia Kaminski–the code in the first manuscript pages, the nerve-gas attack, the binoculars at the Harbor court focused on a warehouse, the mysterious talk about deliveries and chemical formulas, the torture of the tattooed man in the closet…

  His enemy’s defenses were down. He thought of an apt metaphor: They believed the concert was over; they never suspected he’d arranged a spectacular, unexpected crescendo.

  Faust now slipped out of the basement, troubled as he pictured Felicia Kaminski dying in the conflagration. He wasn’t concerned about the young women herself, of course. He was troubled that, if she used the original score to perform from, the manuscript would be destroyed.

  After all, it was easily worth millions of dollars.

  The crowds began assembling outside early, the queue stretching well past a construction site next door to the James Madison hall. Many were people without tickets, hoping for scalpers. But this was a world-premiere of Chopin, not pre-season Redskins, so there were no tickets to be had.

  Harold Middleton made a brief backstage visit to Kaminski, wished her well and then joined his guests in the lobby: Leonora Tesla, J.M. Lespasse and his daughter Charley.

  He said hello to some of the music professors from Georgetown and George Mason, and a few of the Defense Department and DOJ folks from his past life. Emmett Kalmbach came by and shook his hand. “Where’s Dick?” he asked.

  Middleton gave a laugh and pointed across the hall to the head of Homeland Security. “Gave his ticket to his boss.”

  The FBI man said, “At least I appreciate culture.”

  “You ever heard Chopin before, Emmett?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’d he write?”

  “That thing.”

  “Thing?”

  “You know, the famous one.”

  Middleton smiled as Kalmbach changed the subject.

  The lobby lights dimmed and they entered the auditorium, found their seats.

  “Harry, relax” Middleton heard his daughter say. “You look like you’re the one performing.”

  He smiled, noting how she referred to him. The lack of endearment didn’t upset him one bit; it was sign she was recovering.

  But as for relaxing: Well, that wasn’t going to happen. This was going to be a momentous evening. He was bursting with excitement.

  The conductor walked out on stage to wild applause. He then lifted his arm to the right and nineteen-year-old Felicia Kaminski, in a fluid black dress, strode out on stage, looking confident as a pro. She smiled, bowed and stole a glance at Harold Middleton. He believed she winked. She sat down at the keyboard.

  The conductor took his place at the stand. He lifted his baton.

  “Dick, something interesting here.”

  Chambers was in his office at the Department of Homeland Security, working late. He was thinking about the concert and wondering if his boss was appreciative he’d been given the ticket. He looked up.

  “Might want to talk to this guy,” his straight-arrow aide said.

  The caller was a restaurant worker near the James Madison recital hall. As he was leaving work early that morning, he explained, he’d seen a man leave through the hall’s side door. He’d gotten into a car near the site. Thinking it seemed suspicious–the hall had been closed all day–he took a picture of the car and the license plate with his cell phone. He meant to call the police earlier but had forgotten about it. He’d just now called D.C. police and was referred to Homeland Security, since the concert would be attended by some high-ranking government officials.

  “Nowadays,” the restaurant worker said, “you never know—terrorists and everything.”

  Chambers said, “We better follow up on this. Where are you?”

  He’d just gotten off work, the man explained. He gave the address of the restaurant. It was now closed so Chambers told him to wait in a park near the place. He’d have agents there soon.

  “And thank you, sir. It’s citizens like you that make this country what it is.”

  On stage at the recital hall, Felicia Kaminski was playing as she’d never played in her life. She was motivated not by the fact that this was her first appearance as a soloist at a world premiere, but because of the music itself. It was intoxicating.

  Musicians grow familiar with the pieces in their repertoire, the same way husbands and wives grow comfortably close over the years. But there’s something about meeting, then performing, a new work that’s like the beginning of a love affair.

  Passionate, exhilarating, utterly captivating. The rest of the word ceases to exist.

  She was now lost in the music completely, unaware of the thousand people in the audience, the lights, the distinguished guests, the other members of the chamber orchestra around her.

  Only one thing intruded slightly.

  The faint smell of smoke.

  But then she came to a tricky passage in the Chopin and, concentrating hard, she lost any awareness of the scent.

  A dark sedan pulled up fast, near a small park in Northwest D.C., where a middle-aged man in food-stained overalls sat on a park bench, looking around like a nervous bird.

  He flinched when the car stopped and only after spotting the plate Official Government Use and the letters on the side, DHS, did he rise. He walked to the man who got out of the car.

  “I’m Joe. From the diner,” he said. “I called.”

  “I’m Dick Chambers.” They shook hands.

  “Please, sir,” the worker said. He held up his cell phone. “I have the picture of the license plate. It’s hard to read but I’m sure you have computers that can make it, you know, clearer.”

  “Yes, our technical department can work miracles.”

&
nbsp; A man climbed from the car. He called, “Dick, just heard a CNN report on the radio! A fire in the recital hall. It looks big. Real big!”

  Dick Chambers smiled, then turned to the man who had just shouted to him from the car.

  It was Faust.His two thugs stepped out of back of the car and joined him.

  “There, he’s the man I saw,” cried the agitated restaurant worker. “You have arrested him!”

  But then he shook his head, seeing that Faust’s hands weren’t cuffed. “No, no, no.” He dropped the cell phone, staring at Chambers. “You’re part of it! I am dead!”

  Yeah, you pretty much are, the Homeland Security man thought.

  Chambers asked Faust, “What’s going on at the hall?”

  “They are just preliminary reports. No one can see anything. The streets are filled with smoke. Fire trucks everywhere.”

  “The recital hall! You’ve blown it up?”

  He crushed the restaurant worker’s cell phone under his heel. “I’m afraid you were at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He then glanced at Faust, who pulled out a silenced pistol and began to aim it at the worker.

  “Please, sir. No!”

  Which is when the spotlights slammed on, fixing Chambers, Faust and the others in searing glare.

  The restaurant worker dropped to the grass and scuttled away as a loudspeaker blared, “This is Emmett Kalmbach, Chambers. We’ve got snipers and they’re green lighted to shoot. On the ground. All of you.”

  The DHS man blinked in shock but he hesitated only a moment. He’d been in this business a long time. He was four pounds of trigger pressure away from dead, and he knew it. He grimaced, dropped to his belly and stretched out his legs and arms. The two thugs did the same.

  Faust, though, hesitated, the gun bobbing slowly in his hand.

  “You, on the ground now!”

  But undoubtedly Faust knew what awaited him—the interrogation, the conviction and either life in jail or a lethal needle–and chose desperate over wise. He fired toward the spotlights, then turned and began sprinting.

  The lanky man who’d made a job of running from the consequences of his actions got six feet before the snipers ended his career forever.

  Harry Middleton walked forward into the lights set up by the FBI Washington field office crime scene team.

  He glanced at Faust’s body then shook the hand of the man who’d been their undercover decoy—the one who’d pretended to have seen Faust sneak from the recital hall.

  “Jozef. You’re okay?”

  “Ah, yes,” Padlo said. “A scrape on my palm getting under cover. No worse than that.”

  The Polish inspector was stripping off the restaurant worker’s uniform he’d donned for the takedown. He’d flown in that morning. It was true that getting credentials for a foreign law officer to come into America was difficult, but red tape did not exist for men like Harold Middleton and his anonymous supervisors.

  Padlo had learned that Faust was instrumental in the death of his lover M.T. Connolly and called Harry Middleton, insisting that he come help to find Faust and his co-conspirators. There’d be no extradition of any perpetrators to Poland, Middleton had said, but Padlo was willing to give the Americans evidence in the Jedynak murders, which could prove helpful in any prosecutions here.

  Middleton joined Kalmbach and, flanked by two FBI agents, cuffed Dick Chambers, who was staring at the colonel.

  “But…The fire. You were…” His voice faded.

  “Supposed to die? Along with a thousand other innocent people? Well, a team disarmed the bomb this afternoon, pumped the gas out. But we needed to buy some time while we set up this sting. If there was no fire at all, I was afraid you might panic and stonewall. So we lit a controlled fire in the construction site next door to the hall. No damage, but a lot of smoke. Enough to get us some ambiguous breaking news reports.

  “Oh, if you’re interested, the concert went on as planned. The Chopin piece, by the way, was pretty good…I’d rate it A minus. I’m sure your boss enjoyed it. Interesting you gave your ticket to him, knowing that he’d die in the fire. Should have seen his face when I told him it was you who were responsible.”

  Chambers knew he should just shut up. But he couldn’t help himself. He said, “How did you know?”

  “Well, this story that Faust was the mastermind? Bullshit. I couldn’t believe that. He was too arrogant and impulsive. I had a feeling somebody else was behind it. But who? I had some colleagues run a computer correlation on travel to Poland and Italy in the past few months tied to any connections in that part of D.C. where Faust called pay phones. Some diplomats showed up, some businessmen. And you–who worked for the agency that quote accidentally let Vukasin into the country. I found out you also called Nowakowski in prison the day before he offered to give up the Chopin manuscript.

  “You were the number-one suspect. But we needed to make sure. And we had to flush Faust. So we set you up with a phony witness as a decoy. Jozef Padlo, who you’d never met.”

  “This is ridiculous. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, I do. Dick. As soon as I got the call from Poland about the first Chopin manuscript, I became suspicious and made some calls. Intelligence from Northern European suggested possible terrorist activity originating in Poland and Rome. Music might have something to do with it. So I went along, to see what was up. The trail led to a possible nerve-gas attack in Baltimore. We got the chemicals and it looked like the end of the story, except for tracking down Faust.

  “But I got to thinking about things the other night. An attack out of revenge for our meddling in the Balkans? No, the ethnic cleansing there was about politics and land, not religious fundamentalism. That didn’t fit the profile. Maybe Vukasin bought into the ideology but the main players, Faust and Rugova? No, they were all about money.

  “And codes of nerve gas in a manuscript? Just the sort of thing the intelligence gurus would love and keep us from looking at the big picture. But in these days of scramblers and cryptography, there were better ways to get formulae from one country to another. No, something else was going on. But what? I decided I needed to analyze the situation differently. I looked at it the same way I look at music manuscripts to decide if they’re authentic: as a whole. Did this seem to be an authentic terrorist plot? No. The next logical question was what did the fake nerve-gas plot accomplish?

  “Only one thing: It brought me and the rest of the Volunteers out of retirement. That was your point, of course. To eliminate us. The Volunteers.”

  It was Kalmbach who asked, “But why, Harry?”

  “Close to a billion dollars in stolen art and sculpture and manuscripts–stolen by the Nazis from throughout Europe and stashed in a dozen churches and schools in Kosovo, Serbia and Albania. Just like at St. Sophia. We knew that Chambers did a brief tour in the Balkans but got out fast. He must’ve met Rugova and learned about the loot. Then he bankrolled the operation and hired Faust to oversee it.

  “A few years passed and they wanted to cash in by selling the pieces to private collectors. But Rugova preempted them–and he got careless. He didn’t cover his tracks and word got around about the treasures. It was only a matter of time until the Volunteers started to put the pieces together. So Chambers and Faust had to eliminate Rugova–and us too. But to keep suspicion off them they had to make it seem like part of a real terrorist attack. They brought Vukasin and his thugs over here.

  “Well, after I realized his motive, I just looked for what would be the perfect way to kill all of us. And it was obvious: an attack at the recital hall.”

  Now Middleton turned to Chambers. “I wasn’t surprised to find out that you were the one at Homeland Security who suggested the concert, Dick.”

  “This is all bullshit. And you haven’t heard the last of it.”

  “Wrong on number one. Right on two: I’ll be a witness in your trial, so I’ll be hearing a lot more of it. And so will you.”

  Kalmbach and two othe
r agents escorted Chambers and Faust’s two thugs away for booking.

  Middleton and inspector Jozef Padlo found themselves standing alone on the chilly street corner. A light drizzle had started falling

  “Jozef, thank you for doing this.”

  “I would not have done otherwise. So…It is finished.”

  “Not quite. There are a few questions to answer. There’s one intriguing aspect I’m curious about: Eleana Soberski. She had a connection to Vukasin. But I think there was more to her. I think she had her own agenda.”

  He recalled what she said just before she was shot: “We are aware of your relationship with Faust.”

  “Ah,” Padlo said, “so there’s someone else interested in the loot. Or perhaps who has some of his own and would like to expand his market share.”

  “I think so.”

  “One of Rugova’s men?”

  Middleton shrugged. “Doubt it. They were punks. I’m thinking higher up. Someone highly placed, like Dick Chambers, but in Rome or Warsaw or Moscow.”

  “And you are going to find out who?”

  “The case is my blood. You know the expression?”

  “I do now.”

  “I’ll keep at it until I’m satisfied.”

  “And are you going to do this alone,” asked the Polish cop, with a clever gleam in his eye, “or with the help of some friends?

  Middleton couldn’t help but smile. “Yes, we’ve talked about reuniting, the Volunteers.”

  Padlo fished in his pocket for a pack of Sobieski cigarettes. He pulled one out. Then frowned. “Oh, in America, is okay?”

  Middleton laughed. “Outside in a park? That’s still legal.”

  Padlo lit up, sheltering the match from the mist. Inhaled deeply. “Where do you think the stolen art is, Harry?”

  “Faust and Chambers probably have a half-dozen safe houses throughout the world. We’ll find them.”