The girl got up off the piano stool and stepped around the end of the keyboard and came forward. Took the gun from Vukasin, who said, “It’s ready to go. No safety on a Glock. Just point and shoot, like a cheap camera. There won’t be much noise.”

Then he stood off to her left. She raised the gun and aimed it where he had aimed it, at the bridge of Middleton’s nose. The muzzle wavered a little, in small jerky circles. With the sound suppressor it was a long and heavy weapon.

Middleton said, “They’re lying.”

The girl nodded.

“I know,” she said.

She turned to her left, twisting from the waist, and shot Vukasin in the face. He had been right. There wasn’t much noise. Just a bang like a heavy book being slammed on a table, and a wet crunch as the bullet hit home, and the soft tumble of a body falling on thick carpet. Then nothing, just the stink of gunpowder and pooling blood.

The girl twisted back, and lined up on Faust.

“Middleton understands music,” she said. “I can see that from here. He wouldn’t need to torture that melody out of anyone. It was predictable. Like night follows day.”

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.”