Suddenly, the reedy cry of woodwinds broke through. A soprano lilting through a familiar bar of haunting Sprechstimme. Middleton shot forward.

“There! Stop!”

Marcus looked like he’d been told to swallow a toad. “This?”

“Tune it in. Get rid of the static.”

“No, no. Taking us prisoner, that’s wack enough. You can’t torture us too.”

“Tune it in!”

The piece was Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg, 21 songs scored for five musicians on eight instruments, plus voice, with the lyrics half-sung, half-spoken, the first twelve-tone masterpiece of the 20th century. Incomprehensible noise to most people, but not to Middleton, not to anyone who understood, who could hear in it the last throes of Romanticism, with echoes of not just Mahler and Strauss, but Bach.

“Maybe you’re the one who should chill,” Middleton said, easing back in his seat a little. “You think your generation invented rap or hip-hop? Spoken word with musical background goes back over four hundred years. It’s called recitatif. Here, though, Schoenberg’s notes are scored, but in speech we never stay on a single pitch, our voices glide on and off a tone. That’s what the soprano’s doing. It’s left entirely up to her how she does it. Meanwhile, the instruments are conjuring up the landscape: there’s moonlight, insanity, blood . . . ”

Traci was leaning ever so slightly toward the speaker, intrigued now.

Eyeing the Beretta with a newfound skepticism, Marcus said, “You a professor?”

“Sshhh.” It was Traci. The gaunt young coffee-skinned woman with glowing eyes and mussed Afro was rapt. “Act like you got some sense.”

Sulking, Marcus flopped back against the door, moodily scratching his scabbed arm.

Finally, they were quiet; Middleton had his chance to think. But the eerie music, with its tale of the moon-obsessed clown and his Freudian nightmares, only enhanced his dread. Where was Charley, was she safe? Who tried to kill him at Dulles, what was the man after? And what was waiting for him at 122 Fremont Avenue, in the city of Baltimore?

The possible danger to Charley only amplified the need to decipher the threat. His mind spun around and around like that, addled by the fatigue, his fear, thoughts careening against each other senselessly. Meanwhile:

With a white speck of the bright moon
On the shoulder of his black frock coat,
Pierrot saunters off this languid evening
To seek his fortune and look for adventure . . .

Nodding toward the radio, Marcus said, “Sounds like the same old screechy shit, over and over.”

“Not if you understand German.” Middleton rubbed his burning eyes. “And you’re not listening to the accompaniment.”

“It’s edgy,” Traci offered, striving for a compliment, though she’d clearly lost interest already.

Marcus sniffed. “Sounds like some kind of secret code, you ask me.”