Watchlist (10 page)

Nowakowski gave a knowing smile and limped back to the table. “Yes, I’ve been told that I make it a bit too strong. One of the hazards of not having very many guests, I suppose.”

“About the package,” she pressed. “Did you ever receive it?”

“I did.” He spoke the words as if his explanation was complete.

“What was it?”

Signor Abe’s gaze dropped again. Kaminski realized that this was his habit when he was embarrassed. “Dear Henryk asked me specifically not to open the package when it arrived. He told me that it would arrive double-wrapped, and that if anything ever happened to him, I was to open only the outer wrapping and then contact the name I found on the card taped to the inner wrapping.”

“But you opened it anyway,” she said, connecting the dots.

“Loneliness breeds weakness and curiosity,” he replied sadly. “And I’m afraid that I have been particularly lonely.”

“So what was in it?” She found the old man’s embarrassment charming, but she’d have ripped it open in a second if she’d have been in his place. No reason for shame there.

He thought for a moment, and then rose again from his chair. He disappeared into what must have been the bedroom, and then returned less than a minute later with a thick, mangled envelope. “I tried to re-wrap it,” he confessed, “but I’m afraid I made something of a mess.”

The envelope was a large one, more suitable to construction blueprints than a letter. He handled the package gently, with reverence, almost, as he placed it onto the table between them. When Felicia reached toward it, he shooed her hands away.

“Please,” he said curtly. “Allow me to do this.”

She folded her hands on her lap.

The old man wiped his hands aggressively with a napkin, and then carefully slid the contents into the daylight.

Kaminski leaned closer. She saw a stack of papers. Her first impression was that it was very old—yellow with the kinds of marks that could only be made with an old style ink pen. As more of the contents were revealed, she squinted and leaned even closer. “It’s a musical score,” she said, recognizing the rows of staves.

Nowakowski allowed himself a conspiratorial smile. “Much more than that,” he said. He gently placed it on top of the envelope and turned it so that she could better read his treasure.

My God. Could it be what she thought? There was no mistaking the long runs of sixteenth notes and the other musical notations, but as exotic as they looked written by hand, her eyes were drawn to the written signature at the top. In her circles, there was no more famous a signature.

“Mozart?” she gasped.

“An original,” he beamed. “Or at least I think it is.”

She didn’t know what to say. “It must be worth a fortune.”

“Three fortunes,” he corrected. “Priceless, I would think. It’s clearly a piano concerto, but I’ve searched the Koechel Catalogue and this isn’t there. I think this is an undiscovered work.”

She recognized the Koechel Catalogue as the internationally recognized indexer of Mozart’s myriad compositions. If Signor Abe was right, then there truly was no way to estimate the value of the manuscript. “This is fabulous,” she said. “But I don’t understand why it frightened Uncle Henryk. This could have answered all of his wildest dreams. Honestly, this is the kind of discovery that he would have given anything to make. Why would he keep it a secret? Why would he send it away?”

“All very good questions,” Nowakowski agreed. “But I have an even bigger one.”

She waited for it while the old man slid the inner envelope out from under the manuscript. She saw a name, but there was no address.

He said, “Who is this Harold Middleton and how are we supposed to find him?”

9

JOSEPH FINDER

T
he moment her Nextel phone chirped, Special Agent M. T. Connolly had a bad feeling.

She’d just gotten into the elevator at the brand-new building that housed the FBI’s Northern Virginia Resident Agency, on her way back to her office. It was a cubicle, actually, not an office, but she could always dream.

Glancing at the caller ID, she immediately recognized the area code and exchange prefix: the call came from the Hoover building—FBI headquarters in D.C. Not good. Only bad news came from the Hoover building, she’d learned. She stepped out of the elevator and back onto the gleaming terrazzo floor of the lobby.

“Connolly,” she said.

A man’s voice, reedy and overly precise: “This is Emmett Kalmbach.”

He didn’t actually have to identify himself; she’d have recognized the prissy enunciation anywhere. Kalmbach was the FBI’s Assistant Director who oversaw the hundreds of agents in D.C. and Virginia who worked out of the Washington Field Office as well as her satellite office in Manassas, Virginia. She’d met Kalmbach a few times, enough to recognize his type: the worst kind of kiss-up, kick-down bureaucratic infighter. A paper-pushing rattlesnake.

Kalmbach had no reason to call her directly. At least, no good reason. And why was he calling from the FBI’s national headquarters, instead of from his office on Fourth Street?

“Yes, sir,” she said. She sounded blasé, but she felt her stomach clench. She watched the brushed-steel elevator doors glide shut in front of her. The two halves of a giant fingerprint, etched on the elevator doors, came together. The fingerprint had been some government committee’s idea of art, which was precisely what it looked like: art by government committee.

“Agent Connolly, who is Jozef Padlo?”

Ah ha. “He’s an inspector with the Polish National Police and he’s working a triple homicide in Warsaw that—

“Agent—Marion, if I may—”

“M. T., sir.”

But he went on smoothly, ignoring her: “—Our legat in Warsaw just emailed me a letter rogatory from the Polish Ministry of Justice, requesting that we grant immediate entry into the U.S. to this . . . Jozef Padlo. He says you personally guaranteed him clearance. Our legat is understandably ticked off.”

So this was what he was calling about. She hadn’t gone through channels, so some junior FBI paper-pusher, who’d picked the short straw and had ended up assigned to the American Embassy Bureau in Warsaw, had gotten bent out of shape.

“Obviously there was some translation problem,” she said. “I didn’t guarantee anything to Inspector Padlo. He’s provided invaluable assistance to us in a case at Dulles involving the murder of one, possibly two, cops. Since it seems to be connected to his triple homicide, he—”

“It ‘seems to be connected,’” Kalmbach interrupted. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Trying to conceal her annoyance, she explained as crisply as she could. “Padlo was able to ID the shooter at Dulles as a Serb national and a war criminal who—”

“Excuse me, Agent Connolly. He ID’d the shooter based on what?”

“Surveillance video taken at Dulles.”

“Ah. So Inspector Padlo viewed the video, then?”

She faltered. “No. I did. But Padlo made a positive ID based on my verbal description to him.”

“Your . . . verbal description,” Kalmbach echoed softly. Condescension dripped from every word.

“In fact—” she began, but Kalmbach cut her off.

“Do you understand how complex and involved the process is by which a foreign law enforcement official is granted entry into the United States? It involves weeks of legal findings and sworn affidavits by the DOJ’s Criminal Division, the Office of International Affairs. It’s a cumbersome and extremely sensitive legal affair and not one to be taken lightly. For one thing, there must be absolutely incontrovertible evidence of dual criminality.”

Oh, for God’s sake, she thought. The guy lived and breathed paperwork. It was a wonder he hadn’t already died of white lung. “Sir, if Padlo’s right then, those three homicides in Warsaw are tied to these police shootings at Dulles Airport and we’ve got a clear-cut case of dual criminality.”

“A case built on a verbal description over the telephone, Agent Connolly? I hardly think that constitutes a finding of dual criminality. This is an awfully slender reed. I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to grant a visa to Inspector Padlo.”

Yeah, she thought. If Jozef wanted to get into the country quick and easy, no questions asked, he should just join Al Qaeda and enroll in flight school. We’d let him in without a second look.

But she said, “So you’re saying that if we had a clear-cut ID of the shooter—connecting the Warsaw homicides to the Dulles ones—you’d have no problem letting Padlo in?”

“We don’t have that, do we?” Kalmbach said acidly.

“No, sir,” she said. “Not yet.”

“Thank you, Agent . . . Marion.”

“M. T.,” she said.

But he’d hung up.

She’d been M. T. since the age of thirteen.

She’d always hated her given name, “Marion.” Her father had also been Marion; but then, as he was always proud to point out, that was John Wayne’s real name. In Gulfport, Mississippi, where Dad had been a part-time deputy in the Harrison County Sheriff ’s Department, the Duke was up there with Jesus Christ. Bigger, to some folks.

But to her, “Marion” was either a librarian or a housewife in a TV sitcom, and neither fit her self-image. She was a tomboy and proud of it. As tough as any boy, she had even beat up the seventh-grade class bully for daring to call her adored younger brother Wayne a “sissy.”

So she insisted on being called by her initials, which to her ears sounded tough and no-nonsense and the exact opposite of girly-girl. Maybe even a little enigmatic.

Over the years, she’d learned about makeup, and she’d developed a pretty damned nice figure, and she worked out every morning at five for at least an hour. When she wanted to look hot, she could. And she knew that when she put on that slinky red jersey halter dress from Banana Republic she always drew appreciative glances from men.

At work, though, she downplayed her femininity as much as possible. The FBI was still a boys’ club, and she was convinced that the guys took you a lot more seriously if you didn’t arouse their libidos.

Like the guy who sat across from her right now. His name was Bruce Ardsley, and he was a forensic video analyst with the Bureau’s Forensic Audio, Video, and Image Analysis Unit. The main FBI lab was in D.C., in the Hoover building, but they’d recently installed an outpost here because of all the demand on the Bureau since 9/11.

Ardsley wore thick aviator-frame glasses and had greasy hair and long bushy sideburns that might have been modish in the Swinging ‘70s, and he was notorious for trying to hit on all the female agents and administrative assistants. But he’d given up on her long ago. Now they got along fine.

His office, in the basement of the new resident agency building, was no bigger than a closet, jammed with steel shelves heaped with video monitors and digital editing decks and CPUs. Taped to one wall was a mangled poster of a man running up stadium steps. Above his blurred figure was the word PERSISTENCE. At his feet it said, “There is no GIANT step that does it. It’s a lot of LITTLE steps.”

She handed Ardsley two disks. “The one marked Dulles is from Dulles Airport,” Connolly said.

“Clever.”

She smiled. “The other has the photos from Warsaw.” As he promised, Padlo had emailed her photos of Agim Rugova’s henchmen. One of them was Dragan Stefanovic, the man Padlo thought might be the Dulles shooter who’d tried to kill Harold Middleton. Stefanovic had served under Agim Rugova, which made him a war criminal at the very least. After the war, Padlo said, he’d become a mercenary and had gone into hiding.

“High-def, I hope.”

“I doubt it,” she replied.

“Well, all I can do is my best,” Ardsley said. “At least one thing in our favor is the new networked digital-video surveillance system at Dulles. The airports authority dumped a boatload of money on this a couple years ago. Bought a bunch of high-priced Nextiva S2600e wide-dynamic range IP cameras with on-board analytical software-based solutions.”

“Translation, please,” said Connolly.

“Meaning the facial-recognition software is still crap and the images are still fuzzy, but now we can all feel good about how much money we’re throwing at the terrorists.”

“And that’s in our favor . . . how exactly?” she asked.

He pointed to the steel shelves lined with video monitors. “Once the Bureau realized how crappy the facial-recognition system is, they were forced to sink more money into toys for boys like me to play with. Remember the Super Bowl?”

She groaned. The FBI had put in an extensive surveillance system at the Super Bowl in Tampa in 2001 in order to scan the faces of everyone passing through the turnstiles and match them against the images of known terrorists. The ACLU pitched a fit—this was before 9/11, when people listened to the ACLU—but the whole scheme was a resounding flop anyway. The Bureau had rounded up a couple of scalpers and that was it. “You’re telling me the technology’s no better now?”

“Oh, it’s better,” Ardsley said. “Well, a little better.”

Her phone chirped, and she excused herself and stepped out into the hallway.

“Connolly.”

“Hey, M. T., it’s Tanya Jackson in Technical Services.”

“That was fast,” she said. “You got something?”

She’d called the FBI’s Technical Services unit and asked them to run a locater on Middleton’s cell phone to find out where he was at that very instant. Most cell phones these days, she knew, contained GPS chips that enabled you to pinpoint its location to within a hundred meters, as long as it was turned on and transmitting a signal.

“Well, not exactly,” Jackson said. “There’s sort of a procedural problem.”

“Procedural? . . .”

“Look, M. T.,” Jackson said apologetically, “you know we’re no longer allowed to track cell phone users without a court order.”

“Oh, is that right?” Connolly said innocently. Of course, she knew all about the recent rulings. Now you had to get a court order to compel a wireless carrier to reveal the location of one of their cell phones. And to get a court order, you had to demonstrate that a crime was in progress or had occurred.

But Jackson had done her favors before. She’d located cell phones for Connolly without the necessary paperwork. Why did she all of a sudden care about the legal niceties?

“Tanya,” she said, “what’s going on?”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“You’re getting heat on this, aren’t you?” Connolly said.

Another beat of silence, and then Jackson said, “Five minutes after you called me, I heard from someone pretty high up in the Bureau. He reminded me that it was a felony for me to locate a cell phone without a court order. I could go to jail.”

“I’m sorry I put you in that position,” Connolly said.

“I just wanted you to understand.”

“Tanya,” Connolly said. “Was it Emmett Kalmbach, by any chance?”

“I—I can’t answer that,” Jackson said.

But she didn’t have to.

“You’re in luck,” Bruce Ardsley said. He was beaming.

“Dragan Stefanovic is the shooter?”

He nodded.

“How certain can you be?”

“Ninety-seven percent probability of true verification.”

“Bruce, that’s fantastic.” Take that, Kalmbach, she thought.

“The probability on the other one’s lower, though.”

“The other one?”

“Maybe seventy-eight percent probability.”

“Which other one are you talking about?”

Ardsley swiveled around in his chair, tapped at a keyboard, and a large photographic image came up on the flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall in front of her. It was a close-up of a dark-haired man in his 40s wearing a dark, expensive-looking business suit. He had flat, Slavic facial features.

“Where was this taken?”

“A surveillance camera outside a men’s room in Concourse D at Dulles.”

“Who is it?” she said.

“Nigel Sedgwick.”

“Who?”

Ardsley struck another key, and a second photo popped onto the screen next to the first.

“A British businessman. From Bromsgrove, in Worcestershire. That’s England. Or so his passport said. Here in D.C. on a buying trip for his hot-tub business.”

“Looks like it was taken at passport control,” she said.

Ardsley turned around, shrugged modestly, smiled. “Right.”

“How’d you get it?”

“I hacked into Homeland Security. Well, not hacked, really. Just used a backdoor into Customs and Border Protection’s database.”

“So who is this guy really?”

A third image appeared on the screen next to the other two. She immediately recognized the photo as one of the mug shots of Agim Rugova’s men that Padlo had emailed her.

“Vukasin,” she said.

“He entered the country last night on a British Airways flight from Paris. Using a British passport.”

Connolly nodded. “I guess Homeland Security doesn’t have facial-recognition software, huh? Or they’d have stopped him.”

“Oh, they have the software, believe me,” he said. “Plus, this guy Vukasin is on one of their watch lists.”

“Maybe their software isn’t as good as ours.”

“Or maybe someone knew who he was and let him in anyway.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“A lot of what Homeland Security does makes no sense,” Ardsley said.

“What are you saying—you think he was flagged as a bad guy but let through anyway?”

“Yes,” Ardsley said. “That’s what I think. But I’m only a video tech, so what do I know?”

“Jesus,” she breathed.

“So let me ask you something,” he said.

She turned away from the flat-screen. “Go ahead.”

“You ever free for a drink?”

“You don’t give up, do you?” Connolly said.

He pointed at the ripped motivational poster on the wall. “Persistence,” he said with a sheepish smile.

As Connolly approached her cubicle, she saw from a distance that a man was sitting in her chair. Another man was standing next to him.