Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

“… for my debut at the Wigmore Hall,” Felicia repeated, picking up the fiddle and showing it to them. “I thought you wanted to see me play this. It cost you a lot of money.”

Harold Middleton-she refused to shorten his first name since she wasn’t, Felicia wished to say, a colleague-had proved a good friend of sorts. He saved her life on more than one occasion when she was enmeshed in the deadly game of terror and crime that should have ended in a massacre at the James Madison Recital Hall in Washington, D.C., while she performed as the principal soloist for a newly unearthed work by Chopin.

There had been many more favors in the intervening two years. Over that time she ceased to be an impoverished young Polish émigré, without friends at first, without parents, and had began slowly to adjust to the life of a professional musician, taking the first steps on the international orchestral ladder, occasionally and only when absolutely necessary, using Harold Middleton’s many connections. She was grateful. She was also intensely aware that a part of his generosity stemmed from some private, inward guilt for introducing her to the dark and violent world to which he had now returned, one a million miles away from the music which he truly loved.

“I will see you play,” Middleton insisted.

“We both will, Felicia,” Leonora Tesla added.

Middleton winced when he failed to remember the date of the recital.

“Tonight,” she interrupted with a scowl. “Seven o’clock. I texted you. I emailed… ”

“I’m sorry. Give me time, please. Life’s a little… ”-he exchanged looks with his colleague-“… hectic right now.”

Middleton strode over to the tall wardrobe in the living room, a hulking, ugly piece of furniture-the only out-of-place item in the room and one hidden in shadow so that it couldn’t be seen from the long double window that gave out onto the street. The cottage was in a narrow Georgian lane in a backwater of Bloomsbury, walking distance from the West End and the concert hall where she was due that afternoon for a final rehearsal. It was a quiet, discreetly wealthy part of central London away from the crowds and the tourists, a village almost.

When he threw open the wardrobe’s doors, Felicia found herself looking at the object she had found there when she was poking around the place two days before, after arriving from New York-a black, heavy-duty metal security cabinet with a rotary combination lock, like that of an old-fashioned safe. Middleton dialed the numbers then pulled on the handle to open the door. Felicia caught her breath, though in truth she knew she shouldn’t have been surprised. A small armory-pistols, rifles, boxes of ammunitions, other items she didn’t recognize-was neatly lined up inside.

Leonora Tesla put down her shoulder bag, joined him and starting picking at the hardware. Middleton had brought two grey hold-alls for their booty. The two of them looked like a couple in a fancy chocolate store, trying to decide what delicacies to take away with them.

“So the Volunteers are back in business,” Felicia said.

“Supply and demand, kid,” Tesla replied, taking down what looked like a pack of small metal balls. Grenades of some kind maybe. “Be grateful you’re in a nicer business.”

Middleton and Tesla were so utterly absorbed Felicia didn’t feel too bad about poking around at something else while they were so preoccupied.

After a minute, she said, “I am grateful. Yet still, in your new job, you find time to buy nice jewelry. Nora, is this for you?”

They stopped packing weaponry into the soft grey cases and turned to look. In her delicate pale fingers, Felicia held the glittering object that had caught her attention as Leonora Tesla placed her bag on a chair by the dining table, the top half open. The article was enclosed in a transparent plastic evidence packet and tagged with a NATO label bearing the previous day’s date, and what sounded like a French name. It occurred to Felicia that they must have been in a hurry indeed if they sought weapons before delivering what must, she imagined, have been something of importance.

“You know, when we first got to know one another I don’t recall you being in the habit of going through people’s things,” Middleton told her.

“I got older, Harold. Quickly. You remember? With the company you introduced me to it seemed to make sense. What is this?”

She opened the evidence bag and removed the gleaming bright bracelet, studying it closely. When she was done she examined the two other items that had been alongside it: a slip of paper and a recent Indian passport in the name of Kavi Balan. The photo inside showed an inoffensive-looking Indian man perhaps 30 with a bland, perhaps naïve face. He had, she thought, very prominent and unusual eyes and wondered whether they had noticed. Probably not. Harold Middleton and Leonora Tesla were both intelligent, hard-working officers, trapped, Felicia had observed, inside an organization they seemed unable to leave. But small details often escaped them. They possessed neither the time nor the inclination to look much beyond the obvious.

“Our business, not yours,” Middleton announced.

“He’s dead, I imagine,” she said, and they didn’t reply. “Didn’t you notice his eyes…?”

She was stalling and they knew it. As she spoke, she scanned the sheet of paper. The writing was in Harold Middleton’s hand, easily recognizable for its cultured yet hurried scrawl.

It read: Kashmir. Search for water. Geology. Copper. Bracelet. Scorpion. Devras Sikari.

“It sounds like a puzzle,” she said. “I love riddles. I never knew you did… ”

“I hate them.”

“What does Scorpion refer to?”

“It was a reference in an email from Sikari. I think it’s a person, but I don’t know if he’s allied with Sikari or is a threat to him.”

“The bracelet is beautiful.”

It looked like copper, though the color was lighter, more golden than most bangles of its type. In Poland, copper wristbands were popular among the elderly who believed they warded off rheumatism and disease. The jewelry she saw hawked around the cheap street markets in Warsaw looked nothing like this. The metal here was softer, paler, as if it were some kind of subtle alloy, the edges, flecked with green, more finely worked, with a line of writing in a flowing, incomprehensible Indian script, and, most curious of all, an oval feature like a badge, a mark of pride for its wearer perhaps.

“What does this mean?” she asked.

“I wish I knew,” he replied. “We think it’s from Kashmir. An identity bracelet, maybe denoting membership in a gang, a cult, an organization of some kind. Presumably the emblems stand for something. It could be connected with India. Or Pakistan. They’ve been fighting one another over Kashmir for half a century. I need to get it to the lab, get the inscription translated.”

Felicia stared at it and frowned.

“You have any ideas?” he asked.

“What? Some little kid Polish musician? What would I know?” She looked at the copper bracelet again. “You never do crosswords do you?”

“I told you. I hate puzzles.”

“That’s because you think logically, in one direction only. Crosswords are like Bach. Or jazz. They demand you think in several different directions simultaneously. Call and response, question and answer, all in the same moment.”

She examined the bracelet again.

“The point is… All the information you need is there. In front of your face. Nothing is missing. You just have to make the links.”

Middleton looked interested. It was the mention of Bach that did it.

“My problem,” she added, “is I still think in Polish, not English. I love crosswords but they’re too hard for me in your language. I used to wish you could see them instead of read them. You know what I mean? Look at cross pictures . Not words. That way language isn’t so important.”