On stage at the recital hall, Felicia Kaminski was playing as she’d never played in her life. She was motivated not by the fact that this was her first appearance as a soloist at a world premiere, but because of the music itself. It was intoxicating.

Musicians grow familiar with the pieces in their repertoire, the same way husbands and wives grow comfortably close over the years. But there’s something about meeting, then performing, a new work that’s like the beginning of a love affair.

Passionate, exhilarating, utterly captivating. The rest of the world ceases to exist.

She was now lost in the music completely, unaware of the thousand people in the audience, the lights, the distinguished guests, the other members of the chamber orchestra around her.

Only one thing intruded slightly.

The faint smell of smoke.

But then she came to a tricky passage in the Chopin and, concentrating hard, she lost any awareness of the scent.

A dark sedan pulled up fast, near a small park in northwest D.C., where a middle-aged man in food-stained overalls sat on a park bench, looking around like a nervous bird.

He flinched when the car stopped and only after spotting the plate Official Government Use and the letters on the side, DHS, did he rise. He walked to the man who got out of the car.

“I’m Joe. From the diner,” he said. “I called.”

“I’m Dick Chambers.” They shook hands.

“Please, sir,” the worker said. He held up his cell phone. “I have the picture of the license plate. It’s hard to read but I’m sure you have computers that can make it, you know, clearer.”

“Yes, our technical department can work miracles.”

A man climbed from the car. He called, “Dick, just heard a CNN report on the radio! A fire in the recital hall. It looks big. Real big!”

Dick Chambers smiled, then turned to the man who had just shouted to him from the car.

It was Faust. His two thugs stepped out of back of the car and joined him.

“There, he’s the man I saw,” cried the agitated restaurant worker. “You have arrested him!”

But then he shook his head, seeing that Faust’s hands weren’t cuffed. “No, no, no.” He dropped the cell phone, staring at Chambers. “You’re part of it! I am dead!”

Yeah, you pretty much are, the Homeland Security man thought.

Chambers asked Faust, “What’s going on at the hall?”

“They are just preliminary reports. No one can see anything. The streets are filled with smoke. Fire trucks everywhere.”

“The recital hall! You’ve blown it up?”

He crushed the restaurant worker’s cell phone under his heel. “I’m afraid you were at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He then glanced at Faust, who pulled out a silenced pistol and began to aim it at the worker.

“Please, sir. No!”