“There’s nothing else,” he said. Fatigue clouded his thoughts. The men he’d shot in the bar were after the Chopin manuscript, weren’t they?

“Colonel Middleton,” she replied with a wry laugh. “Let’s not be silly.”

“But I don’t know what you want.”

She jabbed the gun deeper into his ribcage. “Then we will leave it that I know what you want—Charlotte and your grandchild.”

Up ahead, the traffic light changed, and Soberski led Middleton off the curb and into the street.

“Anything,” he said, as they reached the yellow line.

“Where is Faust?”

A Mercedes sedan eased to the end of the short queue of waiting cars, blocking their path.

“Faust?”

“We are aware of your relationship with Faust,” Soberski said.

“‘We’? Who’s—”

Before Soberski could react, the driver of the Mercedes jutted his left arm out the open window and squeezed off a shot.

The lone round entered her face at an upward angle, penetrating a nasal bone and exploding the top of her head. Red mist filled the air above Middleton as Soberski collapsed in a heap, the Zastava tumbling from her hand.

“Leave it, Harry.”

As sirens blared, Middleton saw his son-in-law staring up at him from behind the wheel of his ex-wife’s sedan.

“Leave it and get in. Now Harry.”

Seconds later, Jack Perez twisted the wheel and skirted the queue, bursting across the intersection. He raced through a yellow light at George Washington University Hospital, intent on reaching Route 66 before the cops responded to another shooting, this one on Connecticut Avenue.

“Charley?” Middleton asked. The briefcase sat flat on his lap.

“Safe,” Perez said, tires squealing as he turned left.

“Sylvia?”

“No, Harry. They got Sylvia.”

“Where is—”

“The lake house, Harry. Charley’s at the lake house.”

Middleton wiped the side of his face, then stared as his bloody palm.

“Before we get there, Harry, you’d better tell me what’s going on.”

“They’re trying to kill me,” Middleton managed.

“Trying, but you’re not dead,” Perez said. “Sylvia, two guys in the bar, two cops at Dulles—”

“Three people in Warsaw,” Middleton heard himself say.

“And now the hooker.”

“She wasn’t—”

“That’s nine, and none of them is you.”

The ramp up ahead, and what little traffic there was flowed free.

“Jack, listen.”

Perez lifted his right hand from the wheel and silently told his father-in-law to keep still. “I just undid a lifetime’s worth of work reversing my family’s reputation for you, Harry.”

Middleton stayed quiet. He knew the Perez family had been connected in the ’60s to the Genovese crime family through Carlo Marcello, but Army Intel said young Jack had tested clean. He never mentioned the off-the-books background check to Charley.

“In return,” Perez continued, “you tell me what you’re into.”