“How would I? I’m not a part of your violent world.”
He looked at her levelly. “You tried to shoot me, or have you forgotten?”
“I don’t forget anything,” she said shortly.
Something he’d said had chafed her, but he didn’t know what it was. Part of her was frayed thin. Perhaps it was only the shock of her father’s sudden and violent death.
In any case he decided to try another tack. “There’s nothing edible in your refrigerator.”
“I usually go out to eat. There’s a sweet café five blocks away.”
“Do you think we could go there?” he said. “I’m starving.”
“As soon as I’m finished. Our late night delayed my day.”
The piano bench scraped the floor as she settled herself more fully. Then the first bars of Chopin’s Nocturne in B-Flat Minor drifted through the room, swirling like leaves falling on a golden autumn afternoon. He was surprised at how much pleasure the music gave him.
After some moments, he got up, went to the small escritoire and opened her computer.
“Please don’t do that,” Annaka said without taking her eyes from the music sheet. “It’s distracting.”
Bourne sat, trying to relax, while the gorgeous music swept through the apartment.
While the last of the Nocturne was still echoing, Annaka rose, went into the kitchen. He heard the water in the sink running while she waited for it to get cold. It seemed to run for a long time. She returned then, with a glass of water in one hand, which she drank down in a single long swallow. Bourne, watching her from his position at the escritoire, saw the curve of her pale neck, the curl of several stray strands, a fiery copper, at her hairline.
“You did very well last night,” Bourne said.
“Thank you for talking me down from the ledge.” Her eyes slid away, as if she didn’t want any part of his compliment. “I was never so frightened in my life.”
They were in the café, which was filled with cut-glass chandeliers, velvet-seat cushions and translucent wall sconces affixed to cherrywood walls. They sat across from each other at a window table, overlooking the outdoor portion of the café, which was deserted, it being still too chilly to sit in the pale morning sun.
“My concern now is that Molnar’s apartment was under surveillance,” Bourne said. “There’s no other explanation for the police arriving at just that time.”
“But why would anyone be watching the apartment?”
“To see if we showed up. Ever since I’ve arrived in Budapest, my inquiries have been frustrated.”
Annaka glanced nervously out the window. “What about now? The thought of someone watching my apartment—watching us—gives me the creeps.”
“No one followed us here from your apartment, I made sure of that.” He paused while their food was served. When the waiter had departed, he resumed. “Remember the precautions I made us take last night after we escaped the police? We took separate taxis, changed twice, reversed direction.”
She nodded. “I was too exhausted then to question your bizarre instructions.”
“No one knows where we went or even that we’re together now.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” She released a long-held breath.
Khan had just one thought when he saw Bourne and the woman walk out of her building: Despite Spalko’s cocky assurances that he was safe from Bourne’s search, Bourne was continuing to circle closer. Somehow Bourne had found out about László Molnar, the man Spalko was interested in. Furthermore, he’d discovered where Molnar lived and, presumably, he’d been inside the apartment when the police showed up. Why was Molnar important to Bourne? Khan had to find out.
He watched from behind as Bourne and the woman walked off. Then he got out of his rental car, went into the entrance of 106–108 Fo utca. He picked the lock on the lobby door and entered the hallway inside. Taking the elevator up to the top floor, he found the staircase up to the roof. Unsurprisingly, the door was alarmed, but for him it was a simple matter to jump the circuit, bypassing the alarm system altogether. He went through the door, onto the roof, crossing immediately to the front of the building.
With his hands on the stone parapet, he leaned over, saw immediately the bay window on the fourth floor just below him. Climbing over the parapet, he eased himself down onto the ledge beneath the window. The first window he tried was locked, but the other wasn’t. He opened the window, climbed through into the apartment.
He would dearly have liked to look around, but without knowing how soon they would return, he knew he couldn’t risk it. This was a time for business, not indulgences. Looking around for a likely spot, he glanced up at the frosted-glass light fixture hanging from the center of the ceiling. It was as good as any, he quickly determined, and better than most.
Dragging over the piano bench, he positioned it beneath the fixture, then climbed on it. He took out the miniature electronic bug, dropped it over the rim of the frosted-glass bowl. Then he climbed down, put an electronic ear-bud into his ear and activated the bug.
He heard the small noises as he moved the piano bench back into place, heard his own footfalls across the polished wooden floor as he went over to the sofa, where a pillow and down comforter lay. He took up the pillow, sniffed its center. He smelled Bourne, but the scent stirred a previously undisturbed memory. As it began to rise upward in his mind, he dropped the pillow as if it had burst into flame. Quickly now, he exited the apartment as he had come, retracing his steps down to the lobby. But this time he went back through the building, going out the service entrance. One could never be too careful.
Annaka began work on her breakfast. Sunlight streamed in through the window, illuminating her extraordinary fingers. She ate like she played, handling the cutlery as if they were musical instruments.
“Where did you learn to play piano like that?” he said.
“Did you like it?”
“Yes, very much.”
“Why?”
He cocked his head. “Why?”
She nodded. “Yes, why did you like it? What did you hear in it?”
Bourne thought a moment. “A kind of mournfulness, I suppose.”
She put down her knife and fork and, with her hands free, began to sing a section of the Nocturne. “It’s the unresolved dominant sevenths, you see. With them, Chopin expanded the accepted limits of dissonance and key.” She resumed singing, the notes ringing out. “The result is expansive. And at the same time mournful, because of those unresolved dominant sevenths.”
She paused, her beautiful pale hands hanging suspended over the table, the long fingers arched slightly as if still imbued with the energy of the composer.
“Anything else?”
He gave it some more thought, then shook his head.
She took up her knife and fork, went back to eating. “My mother taught me to play. It was her profession, teaching piano, and as soon as she felt that I was good enough, she taught me Chopin. He was her favorite, but his music is immensely difficult to play—not only technically but also getting the emotion right.”
“Does your mother still play?”
Annaka shook her head. “Like Chopin, her health was frail. Tuberculosis. She died when I was eighteen.”
“A bad age to lose a parent.”
“It changed my life forever. I was grief-stricken, of course, but much to my astonishment and shame, beneath that I was angry at her,”
“Angry?”
She nodded. “I felt abandoned, unmoored, left at sea with no way to find my way back home.”
All at once Bourne understood how she could empathize with the difficulty of his loss of memory.
She frowned. “But, really, what I regret most is how shabbily I treated her. When she first proposed I take up the piano, I rebelled.”
“Of course you did,” he said gently. “It was her suggestion. Moreover, it was her profession.” He felt a small frisson in the pit of his stomach, as if she had just now played one of Chopin
’s famous dissonances. “When I talked to my son about baseball, he turned up his nose, wanted to play soccer instead.” As he dredged up the memory of Joshua, Bourne’s eyes turned inward. “All his friends played soccer, but there was something else. His mother was Thai; he was schooled in Buddhism at a very early age, as was her wish. His ‘American-ness’ wasn’t of interest to him.”
Finished, Annaka pushed her plate away.
“On the contrary, I think it was probable that his ‘American-ness’ was very much on his mind,” she said. “How could it be otherwise? Don’t you think he was reminded of it every day at school?”
Unbidden came an image of Joshua in bandages, one eye black-and-blue. When he had asked Dao about it, she had told him that the child had fallen at home, but the following day she had taken Joshua to school herself, had stayed there for several hours. He’d never questioned her; at the time he’d been far too busy at work even to think it through himself.
“It never occurred to me,” he said now.
Annaka shrugged and, without perceptible irony, said, “Why should it? You’re American. The world belongs to you.”
Was that the source of her innate animosity? he wondered. Was it simply generic, the fear of the ugly American that had lately been resurrected?’
She asked the waiter for more coffee. “At least you’re able to work things out with your son,” she said. “With my mother…” She shrugged.
“My son’s dead,” Bourne said, “along with his sister and mother. They were killed in Phnom Penh many years ago.”
“Oh.” It appeared that he had finally punctured her cool, steely exterior. “I’m so sorry.”
He turned his head away; any talk of Joshua felt like salt being rubbed into an open wound. “Surely you came to terms with your mother before she died.”
“I wish I had.” Annaka stared down at her coffee, a look of concentration on her face. “It wasn’t until she introduced me to Chopin that I understood the full measure of the gift she had given me. How I loved to play the Nocturnes, even when I was far from accomplished!”
“You didn’t tell her?”
“I was a teenager; we weren’t exactly talking.” Her eyes darkened in sorrow. “Now that she’s gone, I wish I had.”
“You had your father.”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “I had him.”
Chapter Seventeen
The Tactical Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate was housed in a series of anonymous-looking red-brick buildings covered with climbing ivy that had once been a women’s boarding school. The Agency had deemed it more secure to take over an existing site than to build one from scratch. That way they could gut the structures, creating from the inside the warren of labs, conference rooms and testing sites the directorate required, using their own highly skilled personnel rather than outside contractors.
Even though Lindros showed his ID he was taken inside an all-white windowless room where he was photographed, fingerprinted and his retinas scanned. He waited alone.
Finally, after fifteen minutes or so, a CIA suit entered, addressed Lindros, “Deputy Director Lindros, Director Driver will see you now.”
Without a word. Lindros followed the suit out of the room. They spent another five minutes marching up and down featureless corridors with indirect lighting. For all he knew, he was being led around in a circle.
At length, the suit stopped at a door that, as far as Lindros could tell, was identical to all the others they had passed. As with the others, there was no marking, no identification of any sort anywhere on or near the door, save for two small bulbs. One glowed a deep red. The suit rapped his knuckles three times on the door. A moment later the red light went out and the other bulb glowed green. The suit opened the door, stepped back for him to go through.
On the other side of it, he found Director Randy Driver, a sandy-haired individual with a Marine high-and-tight haircut, a blade-straight nose and narrow blue eyes that gave him a perpetually suspicious look. He had wide shoulders and a muscular torso he liked to show off a bit too much. He sat in a high-tech mesh swivel chair behind a smoked glass and stainless-steel desk. In the center of each white metal wall hung a reproduction of a Mark Rothko painting, each looking like swaths of colored bandages applied to a raw wound.
“Deputy Director, an unexpected pleasure,” Driver said with a tight smile that belied his words. “I confess I’m not accustomed to snap inspections. I would’ve preferred the courtesy of an appointment.”
“Apologies,” Lindros said, “but this isn’t a snap inspection. I’m conducting a murder investigation.”
“Alexander Conklin’s murder, I presume.”
“Indeed. I need to interview one of your people. A Dr. Felix Schiffer.”
It was as if Lindros had dropped an immobility bomb. Driver sat unmoving behind his desk, the tight smile frozen on his face like a rictus. At last, Driver seemed to regain his composure. “What on earth for?”
“I just told you,” Lindros said. “It’s part of our ongoing investigation.”
Driver spread his hands. “I can’t see how.”
“It’s not required that you do,” Lindros said shortly. Driver had made him sit and wait like a child at detention, now he was being given a verbal runaround. Lindros was rapidly losing patience with him. “All that’s required is that you tell me where Dr. Schiffer is.”
Driver’s face closed down entirely. “The moment you crossed my threshold, you entered my territory.” He stood. “While you were undergoing our identification procedures, I took the liberty of calling the DCI. His office has no idea why you might be here.”
“Of course not,” Lindros retorted, knowing he’d already lost the battle. “The DCI debriefs me at the end of the each day.”
“I’ve no interest whatsoever in your operations, Deputy Director. The bottom line is that no one interviews any of my personnel without express written authorization from the DCI himself.”
“The DCI has empowered me to take this investigation wherever I deem it necessary.”
“I’ve only your word for that.” Driver shrugged. “You can see my point of vi—”
“As a matter of fact, I can’t,” Lindros said. He knew that continuing on in this vein would get him nowhere. Worse, it wasn’t politic, but Randy Driver had pissed him off and he couldn’t help himself. “In my view, you’re being obstinate and obstructionist.”
Driver leaned forward, his knuckles cracking as he pushed them down against the desk top. “Your view is irrelevant. In the absence of official signed documents, I have nothing more to say to you. This interview is at an end.”
The suit must have been listening in on the conversation because just then the door opened and he stood there, waiting to escort Lindros out.
It was while riding down a perp that Detective Harris got the brainstorm. He’d received the all-points radio call about the male Caucasian in a black late model Pontiac GTO, Virginia plates, who’d run a red light outside of Falls Church, heading south on Route 649. Harris, who had been inexplicably banished by Martin Lindros from the Conklin-Panov murders, was in Sleepy Hollow, following up on a convenience store robbery-murder when the call came in. Right on 649.
He spun his cruiser around in a ragged U-turn, then had headed off, lights going, siren blaring, heading north on 649. Almost immediately, he saw the black GTO and behind it a string of three Virginia state trooper cars.
He veered across the median in a blare of horns and screeching tires coming from the oncoming traffic and headed straight at the GTO. The driver saw him, changed lanes, and as Harris began to follow him through the jigsaw puzzle of stalled traffic, he veered off the road itself, zipping across the breakdown lane.
Harris, calculating vectors, nosed his cruiser on an intercept course, which forced the plunging GTO onto the apron of a gas station. If he didn’t pull up, he’d crash right into the line of pumps.
As the GTO screamed to a halt, rocking on its oversized shocks, Harris scramble
d out of his car, his service revolver drawn, headed straight at the driver.
“Get out of the car with your hands in the air!” Harris called.
“Officer—”
“Shut up and do as I say!” Harris said, advancing steadily, his eyes peeled for any sign of a weapon.
“Okay, okay!”
The driver got out of the car just as the other cruisers caught up. Harris could see that the perp was no more than twenty-two, thin as a rail. They found a pint of liquor in the car and, underneath the front seat, a gun.
“I’ve got a license for it!” the young man said. “Just look in the glove compartment!”
The gun was, indeed, licensed. The young man was a diamond courier. Why he’d been drinking was another story, one Harris wasn’t particularly interested in.
Back at the station, what had caught his attention was that the license didn’t check out. He made a call to the store that had supposedly sold the young man the gun. He got a foreign-sounding voice that admitted selling the young man the gun, but something in that voice nagged at Harris. So he’d taken a ride over to the store, only to find that it didn’t exist. Instead, he found a single Russian with a computer server. He arrested the Russian and impounded the server.
Now he returned to the station, accessed the gun-permit database for the last six months. He plugged in the name of the bogus gun store and discovered, to his shock, more than three hundred false sales that were used to generate legitimate permits. But there was an even bigger surprise waiting for him when he accessed the files on the server he’d confiscated. When he saw the entry, he grabbed his phone and dialed Lindros’ cell.
“Hey, it’s Harry.”
“Oh, hello,” Lindros said, as if his attention was elsewhere.
“What’s the matter?” Harris asked. “You sound terrible.”
“I’m stymied. Worse, I just got my teeth figuratively kicked in and now I’m wondering if I have enough ammunition to go to the Old Man with it.”