Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

Faust said, “I didn’t know.”

“The two discordant notes,” the girl said. “Making a phantom third. My uncle always called it a wolf tone. And Vukasin means wolf, in Polish. It was a coded message. He was naming his killer.”

“I didn’t know,” Faust said again. “I swear.”

“Talk.”

“I hired Vukasin. Someone else must have gotten to him. Hired him out from under me. He was double crossing me.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I swear. And we can’t waste time on this. The music holds more code than who killed your uncle.”

“He’s right, Felicia,” Middleton said. “First things first. It’s about nerve gas. It could make 9/11 look like a day at the beach.”

“And it’s coming soon,” Faust said.

Kaminski nodded.

“Days away,” she said.

She lowered the gun.

“Forty notes,” Faust said. “Forty letters between A and G. It’s not enough.”

“Add in the Mozart cadenza,” Kaminski said. “That’s bullshit too.”

Middleton said, “Mozart didn’t write cadenzas.”

Kaminski nodded. “Exactly. He didn’t write twenty-eight piano concertos, either. The cadenza is part of the message. Same board, same game.”

Faust asked, “Which first?”

“Mozart. He was before Chopin.”

“Then how many notes?”

“The two things together, a couple hundred in total, maybe.”

“Still not enough. And you can’t spell stuff out using only A through G. Especially not in German.”

“There are sharps and flats. The Mozart is in D-minor.”

“You can’t sharpen and flatten letters of the alphabet.”

“Numbers,” Middleton said. “It’s not letters of the alphabet. It’s numbers.”

“One for A, two for B? That’s still not enough. This thing is complex.”

“Not one for A,” Middleton said. “Concert pitch. The A above middle C is 440 cycles per second. Each note has a specific frequency. Sharps and flats, equally. A couple hundred notes would yield eighty-thousand digits. Like a bar code. Eighty-thousand digits would yield all the information you want.”

Faust asked, “How do we work it out?”

“With a calculator,” Middleton said. “On the treble stave the second space up is the A above middle C. That’s 440 cycles. An octave higher is the first overtone, or the second harmonic, 880 cycles. An octave lower is 220 cycles. We can work out the intervals in between. We’ll probably get a bunch of decimal places, which is even better. The more digits, the more information.”

Faust nodded. Nothing in his face. He retrieved the Mozart manuscript from the credenza and butted it together with the smeared page in the glassine envelope. Clamped the stack under his arm and nodded to Nacho. Then he looked at Kaminski and Middleton and suddenly leapt forward, ripping the silenced Glock from her hand.

He said, “I wasn’t entirely honest before. I didn’t hire Vukasin. We were both hired by someone else. For the same purpose. Which isn’t entirely benevolent, I’m afraid. We have ricin, and everything else we need. But we couldn’t stabilize the mixture. Now we can, thanks to your keen insights. For which we thank you. We’ll express our thanks practically-with mercy. Exactly ten minutes from now, when I’m safely away, Nacho will shoot you both in the head. Fast and painless, I promise.”

The gun in Nacho’s hand came up and rested level, steady as a rock. He was back in his chair, solidly between Middleton and the door. Kaminski gasped and caught Middleton’s arm. Faust smiled once, and his blue eyes twinkled, and he let himself out.

Ten minutes. A long time, or a short time, depending on the circumstances. Ten minutes in a line at the post office seems like an eternity. The last 10 minutes of your life seems like a blink of an eye. Nacho didn’t move a muscle. He was like a statue, except that the muzzle of his gun moved to track every millimetric move that Middleton or Kaminski made, and except that about once every 90 seconds he glanced at his watch.

He took his final look at the time and raised his gun a little higher. Head height, not gut height. His finger whitened on the trigger.

Then the door opened.

Jack Perez stepped into the room.

Nacho turned toward him. Said, “What-”

Perez raised his gun and shot Nacho in the face. No silencer. The noise was catastrophic. They left by the fire stairs, in a big hurry.

Ten minutes later they were in an Inner Harbor diner and Perez was saying, “So basically you told him everything?”

Kaminski nodded her head very ruefully and said, “Yes.”

Middleton shook his head very definitively and said, “No.”

“So which is it?” Perez said. “Yes or no?”

“No,” Middleton said. “But only inadvertently. I made a couple of mistakes. I guess I wasn’t thinking too straight.”

“What mistakes?”

“Concert pitch is a fairly recent convention. Like international time zones. The idea that the A above middle C should be tuned to 440 cycles started way after both Mozart and Chopin were around. Back in the day the tunings across Europe varied a lot, and not just from country to country or time to time. Pitch could vary even within the same city. The pitch used for an English cathedral organ in the 1600s could be as much as five semitones lower than the harpsichord in the bishop’s house next door. The variations could be huge. There’s a pitch pipe from 1720 that plays the A above middle C at 380 cycles, and Bach’s organs in Germany played A at 480 cycles. The A on the pitch pipe would have been an F on the organs. We’ve got a couple of Handel’s tuning forks, too. One plays A at 422 cycles and the other at 409.”

Perez said, “So?”

“So Faust’s calculations will most likely come out meaningless.”

“Unless?”

“Unless he figures out a valid base number for A.”

“Which would be what?”

“428 would be my guess. Plausible for the period, and the clue is right there in the Mozart. The 28th piano concerto, which he never got to. The message was hidden in the cadenza. If the 28 wasn’t supposed to mean something in itself, they could have written a bogus cadenza into any of the first twenty-seven real concertos.”

“Faust will figure that out. When all else fails. He’s got the Mozart manuscript.”

“Even so,” Middleton said. He turned to Kaminski. “Your uncle would have been ashamed of me. I didn’t account for the tempering. He would have. He was a great piano tuner.”

Perez asked, “What the hell is tempering?”

Middleton said, “Music isn’t math. If you start with A at 440 cycles and move upward at intervals that the math tells you are correct, you’ll be out of tune within an octave. You have to nudge and fudge along the way. By ear. You have to do what your ear tells you is right, even if the numbers say you’re wrong. Bach understood. That’s what The Well-Tempered Klavier is all about. He had his own scheme. His original title page had a handwritten drawing on it. It was assumed for centuries that it was just decoration, a doodle really, but now people think it was a diagram about how to temper a keyboard so it sounds perfect.”

Perez took out a pen and did a rapid calculation on a napkin. “So what are you saying? If A is 440, B isn’t 495?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“So what is it?”

“493, maybe.”

“Who would know? A piano tuner?”

“A piano tuner would feel it. He wouldn’t know it.”

“So how did these Nazi chemists encode it?”

“With a well-tuned piano, and a microphone, and an oscilloscope.”

“Is that the only way?”

“Not now. Now it’s much easier. You could head down to Radio Shack and buy a digital keyboard and a MIDI interface. You could tune the keyboard down to A equals 428, and play scales, and read the numbers right off the LED window.”