“Oh, if you’re interested, the concert went on as planned. The Chopin piece, by the way, was pretty good . . . I’d rate it A minus. I’m sure your boss enjoyed it. Interesting you gave your ticket to him, knowing that he’d die in the fire. Should have seen his face when I told him it was you who was responsible.”

Chambers knew he should just shut up. But he couldn’t help himself. He said, “How did you know?”

“Well, this story that Faust was the mastermind? Bullshit. I couldn’t believe that. He was too arrogant and impulsive. I had a feeling somebody else was behind it. But who? I had some colleagues run a computer correlation on travel to Poland and Italy in the past few months tied to any connections in that part of D.C. where Faust called pay phones. Some diplomats showed up, some businessmen. And you—who worked for the agency that quote accidentally let Vukasin into the country. I found out you also called Nowakowski in prison the day before he offered to give up the Chopin manuscript.

“You were the number-one suspect. But we needed to make sure. And we had to flush Faust. So we set you up with a phony witness as a decoy. Jozef Padlo, who you’d never met.”

“This is ridiculous. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, I do. Dick. As soon as I got the call from Poland about the first Chopin manuscript, I became suspicious and made some calls. Intelligence from Northern Europeans suggested possible terrorist activity originating in Poland and Rome. Music might have something to do with it. So I went along, to see what was up. The trail led to a possible nerve-gas attack in Baltimore. We got the chemicals and it looked like the end of the story, except for tracking down Faust.

“But I got to thinking about things the other night. An attack out of revenge for our meddling in the Balkans? No, the ethnic cleansing there was about politics and land, not religious fundamentalism. That didn’t fit the profile. Maybe Vukasin bought into the ideology but the main players, Faust and Rugova? No, they were all about money.

“And codes of nerve gas in a manuscript? Just the sort of thing the intelligence gurus would love and keep us from looking at the big picture. But in these days of scramblers and cryptography, there were better ways to get formulae from one country to another. No, something else was going on. But what? I decided I needed to analyze the situation differently. I looked at it the same way I look at music manuscripts to decide if they’re authentic: as a whole. Did this seem to be an authentic terrorist plot? No. The next logical question was what did the fake nerve-gas plot accomplish?