“Funny you should say that.” Middleton stared out the grimy window at the blurring trees. “There were rumors during World War II that the Nazis were using twelve-tone music to send messages to sympathizers in the American cultural elite. There’s no standard melody, people can’t pick out a wrong note—”

“Sounds like nothing but wrong notes.”

“Exactly. All the easier to hide a message in it. Who’s going to know when the music is off?”

He flashed on the Chopin manuscript in his briefcase, the one he’d thought the Polish authorities had wanted when they’d stopped him at the Krakow airport. His conviction it wasn’t genuine lay exactly in several passages of oddly discordant cadences, unlike the meticulously melodic Chopin. What if it’s a code, he wondered. What if it’s not the manuscript or the other music they’re after, but something far more valuable, something only to be found by decrypting the counterfeit folios?

Inspired suddenly, he reached down for his briefcase to check the manuscript—only to realize the briefcase wasn’t there.

No please, he thought. Dear God. He mentally backtracked to the St. Regis, remembered placing his cell phone in his pocket at the restroom sink, then shambling out to the bar, checking his ravaged, hopelessly memorable reflection in the mirror before dropping the cell phone into his briefcase, snapping it shut. Had he then just wandered off without it? How dementedly absent-minded. It was one more sign of how addled, scattered—moonstruck, like mad Pierrot—he’d become.

“Turn the car around.”

Traci glowered over her shoulder. “Come again?”

“Turn the car around! We’re going back to the hotel.”

The two hapless thieves glanced back and forth. Marcus said, “Check out your eyes, mack.”

Traci chimed in, “You beginning to scare me, Mr. Gray.”

Middleton lifted the Beretta, placed the tip of the barrel against the back passenger-side window, and pulled the trigger. The thundering report in the small car, topped by the piercing hiss of shattered glass, deafened him again. Traci opened her mouth in a silent scream, hunching forward in terror as she fumbled to maintain hold of the steering wheel. Marcus clutched his head, staring at the gun with wide-eyed dread. The burnt sulfur smell of cordite, fanned by the sudden gust of black wet summer heat, finally masked the stench of the car’s moldering interior.

Middleton reached forward, clutched Marcus’s collar with his free hand while jabbing the pistol forward. As before at the airport, every sound came swathed in invisible muck, and yet from somewhere deep within his thrumming skull he heard the underwater roar of his own words, shouted at Traci: “I said turn the car around or I swear to God I’ll kill him—I’ll kill him, understand? Right here. I’ll kill you too.”