Sonata (North Security 3)

“I went to your shows in the US. Almost all of them.”

There’s a crack in my heart, but it’s not going to let her in. It’s only going to fracture. Any orphan wants to have parents. Any orphan dreams of it. I wasn’t different that way, except that I thought she was dead. “Why did Daddy say you died?”

“Maybe he thought it would be easier for you to handle that way.”

“It wasn’t.”

“More likely he did it to protect me. If I were dead, then no one could come after me to use against him. No one could threaten me to get what they wanted from him.”

The words raise alarm along my spine. If someone could threaten her to get to him, they could threaten me. Is that what happened? No, he turned the gun on me in Carnegie Hall.

That’s something a daughter doesn’t forget.

“Your father did bad things. I think at the beginning he did it for the right reasons.”

“There are no right reasons for treason.”

That earns me a sharp glance.

Is that how I look when I’m displeased with Liam? God, how strange to see my face on someone else. Even stranger because it’s so ordinary. It’s something everyone with a family would know. Not rare. Not heartbreaking.

“He thought he was doing something important. Or maybe he only wanted to believe that. Then it became about the money. Then… it was too late to leave, even if he wanted to. Well, he probably didn’t want to. He liked the money too much.”

“Is that why you left him?”

“I left him because I was afraid. I was afraid of the men he was in business with, the people, the entire countries who felt they owned him because of what they paid.”

“The songs he taught me—”

“He called it his insurance policy.”

Greed and ambition. The most common human motivations. I glance back at Liam, who has never been moved by either one of those things. We stop at a small gathering of flowers, a rare spot of color in a landscape of white concrete and green grass. A red ladybug rests on a wide green leaf. It means good luck, Bethany said. This particular ladybug must not have gotten the message.

“Insurance how?”

“It was a back door. A code that could get into the system. Even having it would prove that corruption had happened. That he could also influence the results meant he was a force to be reckoned with.”

“I don’t understand. What system?”

“Oh. You didn’t know? The electronic voting system.”

Dear God. There is no excuse for treason, but this is somehow more than I expected. I thought there would be secrets handed over. Maybe information about weaponry. The kind that wouldn’t actually get used because we weren’t at war.

This has very real, very scary consequences.

“I’ve already written down the musical score in detail.” A broken laugh escapes me. “I played most of it for hundreds of people before the shots rang out. It’s recorded. Why are they still after me if this back door is already out there?”

“Because you are the only link to your father and them. You are the link that will be used to assassinate them privately or declare war publicly. You are the most dangerous person in the world to some of the most dangerous people.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Emperor Napoleon III launched an architectural design competition for the design of the new opera house. Charles Garnier’s project was one of about 170 submitted.

Samantha

People either love or hate the Palais Garnier.

It has its own style, which is really a nice way of saying it borrows from many other styles, taking only the most loud and ostentatious parts. Seventy-three sculptors created the outside cornices and embellishments alone.