She was standing there, tall and slender, on the moonlit stage. As beautiful as a goddess in the long ebony gown. She lifted the Stradivarius to her shoulder, set her chin on the glowing wood, closed her eyes. Waited for a heartbeat.
Then the storm of notes, soaring out over the valley.
He froze. Not Paganini. She was playing Tartini.
The Devil’s Trill.
Why? Why was she playing another piece?
The first frisson of fear touched his skin.
He stood very still, caught up in the wild, virtuosic music.
Then he saw the face of the man on the far side of the stage.
Something was wrong.
He ran toward her, shouting, as the furious frenzied notes filled his head.
No!
The stage exploded in a fireball of flame.
Victor Orsini woke with a start.
The phone on the table was ringing, sharp and loud as an alarm.
Sweat drenching his skin, heart thundering in his chest.
He opened his eyes. Dark.
The phone stopped ringing.
Orsini took a ragged breath.
The nightmare told him that final act had begun. Soon, he would have his revenge. And at the center of it all was Magdalena O’Shea…
The agonized notes of the Devil’s Trill still echoed in his head.
It had been a long time since he’d dreamed of Ravello.
PART II
Searching
Fled is that music...
—John Keats
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN. FOUR A.M., JULY 6
Colonel Michael Beckett shook his head with disbelief as he closed the report on the Bright Angel operation with an irritated snap and stared down at the thick file in his hand.
Bright Angel. Where the devil do you get these names, Sugar?
He gazed out the window of the Airbus A380 military transport. Stars off to his right, red wing lights blinking, pink dawning in the east. Already morning in Paris.
They’d left Andrews Air Force Base hours ago. Taking a long swallow of Jack Daniel’s, he gazed down at the dog curled under the seat across the aisle. Courtesy of Sugar. The man could charm the fleas off a hound dog.
He drank again, wishing for a smoke. He pictured the last five Marlboros in their wrinkled cellophane pack and the heavy gold lighter, all stowed safely in his bag, then leaned his head back against the seat and exhaled wearily. Only five left.
Okay, back to work. This is what we have...
One: Ten months ago, US diplomat Sofia Orsini is brutally murdered in Brittany. Her son vanishes into thin air. And her husband, expat multimillionaire Victor Orsini, disappears. Simon Sugarman spends a week asking questions on a tiny French island in the middle of nowhere—and gets nowhere fast.
Two: Ten months of investigation, with every lead turning as cold as a January snow in the Blue Ridge. The search grinds to a halt. Then a photograph surfaces in Washington, proving Victor Orsini was alive and well just weeks ago in a café in Paris.
Three: Orsini, code-named “Bright Angel” by Sugar, is considered by Interpol to be a big-money player in the terror game. Orsini left the CIA in 1985 and resurfaced a decade later in Rome. So what had he been doing for those years he went missing? Where did the big money come from?
And what happened to him in 1985 that made him want to disappear? Every old case had a trigger. What was the trigger for Orsini? And why was everything happening now?
“More loose threads than my Sunday suit,” muttered Beckett.
Four: Sugarman needs to track down Orsini fast, as he is suspected of bankrolling a major terrorist strike against the US. Soon. The clock is ticking.
Five: The only lead to Orsini is the younger, bearded man in the café photograph, a man who may—or may not—be an American MIA named Zachary Law. A man who may—or may not—be in up to his eyeballs with Orsini. A man who may—or may not—be Sofia Orsini’s murderer. A man who may—or may not—be dead. So it all comes down to finding Zachary Law. Dead or alive.
And if he is alive, what the devil has he been doing for the last thirty years? And how did he end up in a photograph with Victor Orsini?
Six: Magdalena O’Shea, code name “Concerto.” Beckett shook his head. A Boston musician. But according to Sugarman, the best person to find—and connect with—Zachary Law.
Right. He looked over at the Golden. “You don’t go to a whorehouse to play the piano,” he muttered. The dog did not respond.
Beckett flipped open the file and once more scanned the interview printed in the Boston Globe after a local concert last September. Magdalena O’Shea—acclaimed classical pianist, owner of The Piano Cat music shop, Conservatory board member, founder of Boston’s MusicKids program, one married son.
His eyes focused on the quotes from the critics. “O’Shea’s technical control, always pushed to the edge, is masterful,” said one, “but beyond that, one is swept up by her passion as she becomes one with the piano.”
One critic said, simply, “Maggie O’Shea looks like a nymph and plays like an angel.”
Glissando trills, pizzicatos, cadenzas...and the sum total of his knowledge of classical music came from late-night Hitchcock movies.
Beckett scowled down at the picture accompanying the article. Pretty woman, with all that long dark hair and eyes as deep as the lake back home.
Okay, he told himself, so maybe she’s damned good at what she does. But probably a prima donna, intense, temperamental as hell. And a total amateur when it comes to going head to head with Sofia Orsini’s murderer.
He jammed the file into his briefcase and secured the steel locks with a small key attached to his belt. Pulling off his glasses, he rubbed his weary eyes. He felt so damned tired. What did he see when he looked in the mirror? A guy on the wrong side of sixty, with a hard, crooked face and hair curling gray around his temples.
His knee was aching again, and Beckett leaned back in the seat. He’d never expected to take a hit in a crowded Afghani square, never imagined that a hole in his chest and a bullet in the thigh would decide his retirement date. But at least life in the Blue Ridge was far better than being found one morning at the office, red-taped to death.
Wasn’t it?
He gripped his aching knee, shook his head. He looked over at the dog, who was now staring at him with sad, liquid brown eyes. “Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking. So maybe I miss the action.”
This operation, he knew, would be his last hurrah. Then back home to Virginia, where he could fish, read, carve, play his guitar, and try to bring back his tennis game. And try not to die of boredom.
But first, he would find Victor Orsini. On his own. After he ditched Magdalena O’Shea, the biggest unknown of all.
“I needed someone above suspicion, Mike,” Sugarman had said in his briefing. “She’s not an agent, she’s not military, she has no rules or laws to follow. She’s a musician, for Pete’s sake! Who’d think a woman like her would be involved in this thing?”
“Orsini would. He knows her, Sugar.”
“He knows she’s a pianist. She’s in France for music, what could be more innocent?”
“Damn it, Sugar, you’re putting her life in danger. People connected to Victor Orsini die. Sofia Orsini was murdered—and she was his wife!
“Get off your white horse long enough to see the big picture, pal. The only way to take this enemy is from inside the camp.”
“Then do it with a trained team, not an amateur. I won’t be her babysitter.”
“If you want out, Mike, just say the word. Maggie O’Shea is all I’ve got. Zach Law was once in love with her. Now he’s concealed somewhere deep in Orsini’s empire. We need someone to get close. Real close. She can get into places we can’t!”
That was Sugarman for you. A True Believer in the end justifying the means.
Outside the window, the black night rushed past and lights winked red on the Ai
rbus’ giant wings. The innocence of the O’Shea woman had struck home, stirring memories Beckett had tried to keep buried. Against his will, the memories of another woman pulled at him insistently, just as Europe now pulled him once again toward her shores.
Kandahar.
She’d been barely out of her teens. A sweet, inexperienced girl from a small town in Missouri, recruited by NATO and assigned against his objections to his team. Silky blond hair falling to her waist, and the bluest eyes he’d ever seen.
He’d thought the operation was going so well.
Until he found her in an old warehouse at the airport east of the city. Naked, tied to a chair, with her head falling to one side so that the blond hair, stained with dark blood, hung almost to the floor. The look of betrayal in the open blue eyes.
A damned waste of a young life. But she had wrecked an important operation that had taken months to plan. One wrong word to the wrong person. And she was dead.
The plane shuddered with turbulence, and Beckett opened his eyes with a start. The dog whimpered in his sleep. The innocents always die, Beckett thought savagely. And too often they drag you down with them.
He took a long pull of Jack Daniel’s. He was damned if he would risk this operation—or his life—like that again.
He would establish contact with the O’Shea woman in Paris, find out the information he needed, then pack her off to the airport. Then—alone—he would begin the search for the kid and Orsini. On his own terms.
Forty-some years in the military had not kept him from making his own rules when it mattered, and his instincts had saved his skin more than once. But maybe it also explained why he had been passed over during the last round of promotions. That, and the double bourbons he seemed to need since his last tour in Afghanistan.
He gazed over at the Golden, now stirring with dreams. Nightmares? “We’ve all got them, Dog,” he murmured. Okay, so maybe he’d lost his edge. But now he had another turn in the batter’s box. He was going to get Orsini. Go out with a bang, not a whimper.
Once more he thought about the Bright Angel file locked in his briefcase and the woman code named Concerto. Magdalena O’Shea. Add in Zachary Law. Victor Orsini. What connected all of the players? What was the one thing they all had in common? Sofia Orsini? No. Education? No. Work? Friends? Passions?
“Music,” he said suddenly.
Music.
What if the O’Shea woman had something Orsini needed? She was a musician, after all. If music was the common thread. then Magdalena O’Shea was at the center of the storm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
PARIS. EARLY MORNING, JULY 6
Maggie O’Shea swallowed the too-sweet café au lait and gazed thoughtfully at the early editions of Le Monde, Le Figaro, and the International Herald Tribune. Each newspaper was folded to the style section, where her own face stared enigmatically back at her.
“American Pianist Magdalena O’Shea in Paris for Lecture Series at the Conservatoire de Musique.”
Simon Sugarman had not wasted any time casting his lure. The articles were truthful—as far as they went. If Zach were still in Paris, he would know she was here.
But then what?
As she refolded the Tribune she glanced at two other headlines. “American Secretary of State in Paris to Meet with French Foreign Minister.” She’d seen the black limos and extra security on the Left Bank. And below that headline, “U.S. Director of the National Gallery of Art Murdered in the Kennedy Center Opera House.” Her eyes scanned the story. Another horrible knifing. She shuddered and dropped the newspaper to the floor.
Johnny’s calendar book rested on the window seat beside her, along with several pages of her own research. She touched the smooth leather, and memory flared like a match. She saw her husband sitting in his red wing chair in Boston, writing furiously.
I’m onto something, Maggie. Something big.
How many times had he said those words to her, before he kissed her and disappeared to some far away place? He’d been on to something big this last time as well. It was all here, in his calendar. Very slowly, after days of research, she was beginning to put the pieces together. It was like learning a difficult passage of music.
And now, in a few hours, she would meet Colonel Michael Beckett and together they would begin the search for Zach. She couldn’t just sit and wait. She had to do something.
She scooped up Johnny’s calendar, locked it in the small safe in her closet, and reached for her running shoes.
* * *
“Damned French and their steps!” murmured Michael Beckett. Leaning heavily on a thick wooden cane, he looked down at the Golden Retriever. “Especially for guys like us, with three legs each.” The Golden growled his agreement.
They stood on the terrace of the Sacred Heart Basilica, still out of breath, two feet apart, on a hilltop high above the rooftops of Paris.
Montmartre spread out over the hillside below them like the skirt of a Moulin Rouge dancer, full of color and mystery and promise. High pitched roofs angled over narrow alleys, blue shutters flung open to the sunlight, thin Parisian women drinking coffee behind curtains that stirred like long white skirts in the breeze.
It had taken them a long time to negotiate all the steps. The dog, on three legs, could barely manage a dozen steps at a time. And to be honest, thought Beckett, glaring down at his cane, he’d been grateful for the rest stops, too. Then they’d searched the huge domed Basilica for an hour, with no luck.
Now Beckett bent to give the dog the rest of the water just as the great bells of Sacré Coeur began to ring, and he looked up at the cupolas that towered like a fantastic wedding cake above all of Paris. Magdalena O’Shea hadn’t been in the beautiful old church. So now he had to find his way to the cemetery.
Just for a moment, a shadow touched the stony eyes. Then his face hardened as he thought about his morning. Hung over and dog-tired, at seven a.m., he and the Golden had limped into the modern lobby of the Ambassador Hotel and been told that “la belle Madame had arrived early this morning, mais oui, Monsieur, but checked out immediately, who could understand Americans these days?”
He’d fumed in the café for thirty minutes, drinking an outrageously expensive cup of coffee, before thinking to ask for messages. There it was: “M. O’Shea can be reached at Relais Odette, off Rue Dauphine.”
The sleepy concierge at the small Left Bank hotel had been very helpful. “I know the one you seek, Monsieur, but she is not in her room. She checked in two hours ago, then out running before breakfast was served. What is this fascination you Americans have with the exercise? Ce matin, Monsieur, she was off to Sacré Coeur. And she asked the way to Père Lachaise.”
The concierge had gestured vaguely toward the east, and then squinted at the blank look on Beckett’s face. “Le Cimetiere, Monsieur,” he explained. “Père Lachaise is where the great ones are buried.”
A cemetery. Just what he needed. “Haven’t even met the woman yet and already she’s making me crazy,” he muttered to the dog. The Golden ignored him while keeping a wary eye on the loud, gesturing tourists climbing toward them.
He’d better hurry. The cemetery was just opening and the man who’d murdered Sofia Orsini was sure to take a very personal interest in this little operation. Sugarman had cast his lines well. Including the lure of a beautiful, brilliant pianist named Magdalena O’Shea. The man would be looking for her, all right.
And the man was a killer.
But so am I, the colonel told himself.
* * *
At that moment, the man responsible for the violent death of Sofia Orsini was sitting in a café on Boulevard Haussmann drinking a double espresso. His pale eyes were focused on the front entrance of the Paris Ambassador Hotel across the busy boulevard.
He’d seen the reservation confirmation on Magdalena O’Shea’s music shop desk in Boston.
She should be arriving at any moment. He smiled with anticipation.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
PARIS. MORNING, JULY 6
“I hope their love was worth it.”
Beckett gazed down at the stone figures, stained green with lichen, who lay side by side for eternity under a canopy of shade-cooled rock. Abelard and Heloise, according to his map. The twelfth century abbot and his beautiful, pregnant lover.
The Golden hunched wearily at his side, clearly not interested in the age-old tragedy.
Père Lachaise was not at all what Beckett had expected. Built on a gentle slope of hillside in the northeast corner of Paris, the cemetery was like a very old, quiet town. The curving, narrow tree-lined lanes and alleys were crowded with mausoleums, statuary, altars, and obelisks, all standing shoulder to shoulder, guarding their dead like silent sentinels.
Beckett slipped on his glasses, fascinated by the ancient graves and sculptures. A mother gazing at her sleeping baby. A young poet frozen in white stone, pensive and dreamy. A man holding the detached head of a woman.
Beckett concentrated on the cemetery map. Where would an insomniac musician be? His finger moved down the list of names buried in the cemetery. Delacroix. Isadora Duncan. Sarah Bernhardt—a definite possibility. Balzac, Proust. Edith Piaf? Maybe. Jim Morrison. His silver eyebrows drew together. A classical pianist interested in The Doors singer? Not bloody likely.
He looked down at the Golden. “Any ideas?”
The dog shook his sleek head and turned away.
No help there. Gertrude Stein, Chopin. His finger stopped at Chopin. O’Shea would go for the composer. Frederic Chopin, section eleven. Up the hill to the left. Up. That figured. He ignored the knee, grasped his cane and the leash, and began to climb. The Golden resisted, then limped and hopped along behind him.
They found Chopin’s tomb under a quiet arch of green. A delicate marble muse, head bowed, sat atop a high rectangle of stone. A yellow tomcat slept curled at her feet. Bouquets of flowers obscured the carved letters.
The Golden stared at the cat but remained surprisingly still. “Remind me to give you the ‘Dogs Don’t Like Cats’ lecture,” muttered Beckett.
The Lost Concerto Page 11