After the first day or so they recalled the divers, knowing that the Mediterranean would surrender its dead eventually. Coffin makers began to work double shifts, and even still shortages were a problem. Skids of tombs were imported from France and Portugal while the bodies spoiled quickly in the withering heat of the Spanish sun.


On a night where moon’s crescent hung in the cloudless sky like a slice of melon barely illuminating the docks, the tide brought the bodies in and gently deposited them on the beaches of Roquetas de Mar . Most of them were wearing their finest, seemingly already prepared for the grave. But there were exceptions. There were fishermen, and soldiers, and lovers who simply wanted a night on the sea. There were the passengers of two cruise ships.

It was the largest loss of life in peacetime that had ever occurred and there were no answers. There was only a suspicion – terrorism.

In the next week, attacks towards Muslims rose in sleepy Almeria. Some were beaten, their homes were burned, and the Guardia Civil and the Policia Nacional descended upon the port town to stem the violence. However, their remedies were bitter.

It was state of emergency. By the time Mo Rutherford landed in Madrid the whole world media had had a good twenty four hours of time to raise emotions to a fever pitch. Mo never logged into his hotel, he hired a car and he went straight to Centro Nacional de Inteligencia headquarters.

He forgot to remove the lollipop from his mouth when he went in. The guards looked at him curiously as they checked his identification.

“I used to smoke,” Mo said apologetically. “I got to always have something in my mouth.”

They nodded utterly disinterested. He replaced the lollipop with a toothpick. There was a problem with his identification that took twenty odd minutes to straighten out. In the end Olzabal had to come out personally and get him.

“I’m sorry about the delay,” Olzabal said, eyelids dark from lack of sleep. “Your information should have been forwarded to the guard post, but things have been hectic here. We’ve had a lot of trouble co-coordinating with the Grupo Especial de Operaciones, the Policia Nacional, and the Guardia Civil. Franco has been gone for some time but his reputation and methods still exist.”

“How are things coming along,” Mo said. The apology was meaningless. Precious time had already been lost. Maybe he should have signed into the hotel.

“We don’t know what happened,” Olzabal said. “The clues don’t make any sense.”

“Get me an office and then give me what you got,” Mo said. “I am operating with the full authority and sanction of the United State Government. You can count on our support.”

“Very good,” Olzabal said. “We need it.”

“I need all the information you can give me as quickly as you can give to me, and I need to be in Roquetas de Mar by this evening.”

Olzabal paused and looked up. His brows furrowed over delicate pince-nez glasses.

“Right now that is primarily an area suited for the military and the police. There’s a great deal of violence daily, we’re close to declaring martial law. The majority of the initial investigative work is being based at the capital. Besides- why would you even want to go?”

“Because,” Mo replied. “If one is on the spot, disorders are seen as they spring up, and one can quickly remedy them; but if one is not at hand, they are heard of only when one can no longer remedy them. Besides this, the country is not pillaged by your officials.”

Olzabal smiled slightly.

“Machiavelli,” he said. “You’re well read Mr. Rutherford. You’ve made your point. I’ll arrange for an escort to accompany you. First – your office.”

“Tell me what you know while we walk, “Mo said. He pulled a lollipop out of his pocket, and replaced the toothpick which wasn’t doing the job.

“What we know doesn’t make sense,” Olzabal said. “The epicenter of the disaster appears to be the Miklos family yacht. Its custom built, there are five decks above the waterline, three below with all the amenities you’d expect from a billionaire’s boat. The medical staff on board is exceptional, that’s the first thing we researched. The crew was competent. There was a party planned and the boat set sail with three hundred guests, and an indeterminate amount of crew and service personnel. It was only supposed to be a two day trip at the most.”

“All communications with the boat ceased after the first evening, although no one was particularly alarmed at the time. God only knows what the proclivities of the rich are, we like to be kept in the dark when it comes to that. But…we started to get calls from the families. There were cell phones and onboard satellite phones, but no communication in any form came from the boat.”

“The yacht ran aground and every single person onboard was sitting on the top deck, dead of thirst, although they were surrounded by enough supplies to last them for months. They were all in their Sunday’s finest, the waiters had died in the back of the room, the musicians were still holding their instruments, and the cooks died on the threshold of the kitchen door.”

“But that wasn’t all. Every vessel within a thousand feet of the yacht’s estimated path eventually ran aground as well. Those people did not die of thirst, but instead drowned try to swim towards the boat. This included fishing vessels, individual boats, sailing teams, water-skiers, and I hesitate to say – military personnel. All dead.”

“We began an immediate quarantine, we had U.N. scientists immediately available, and we were able to very rapidly test for every pathogen imaginable. Those that drowned were utterly normal, those that died on the boat died of thirst, and that is all the coroners and doctors can tell us.”

Mo sat down, ignoring Olzabal’s statement. It was too early to tell if there was an unknown pathogen, he could now only assume the rest of the investigation was as presumptuous.

He was too tall for the desk; he couldn’t get his knees underneath it. His large hands draped far over the arms of the chair. His thick eyebrows nearly touched as he frowned.

“What the hell were boats doing within a thousand feet of a yacht that size,” Mo said. “They should be at least a quarter mile away-“

“You took a car ride here didn’t you,” Olzabal said with a smile. “You’ve seen how people drive. That’s how they are on the sea.”

“Point well taken,” Mo said. “You said you lost a military vessel?”

“An Elcano, one of our Unidad de Operaciones Especiales training vessels,” he replied. “Carried a crew of somewhat less than three hundred, they were learning combat diving. Nearly all of them died, except for a couple cooks and mechanics in the belly of the ship.”

“If military personnel were involved, then I imagine you have a black box of sorts recording everything that happened before your men went for a swim,” Mo said, after a long pause. “Where’s that info?”

Almirante Diaz hung up the phone in a state of displeasure that he couldn’t remember having reached in some time.

“That was the Capitan General de la Armada,” he snapped. “Where is the information from the Elcano?”

The Contralmirante’s eyes darted around the room, a sign of his complete humiliation. Getting information from the sunken ship was a total priority, but the lab had been utterly silent. His mother had consistently advised him to become a plumber, and at the moment he regretted his current decision.

“I will send the capitan,” he said, his voice suddenly dry.

“You will go with the capitan,” Diaz said.

The Capitan’s face was grim when the Contralmirante walked into the room. His pistol lay on the desk in front of him, next to a bouquet of flowers. There was a ceiling fan turning lazily.

“What is going on here,” the Contralmirante barked.

“I have sent for results from the lab several times,” the Capitan said. “The lab called me four hours ago to say they had unlocked the audio and video files from the ship’s black box. They never answered my summons after that. I sent a private to retrieve the information and they shot him through the door. His body is still in the hallway. I sent for military police, and they established audio and visual contact with the laboratory. They immediately dropped their headphones and ran into the room, where a firefight broke out. More MPs came, established contact with the room, dropped their equipment and ran into the laboratory where they were killed – by the first batch of MPs that entered the room.”

“Part of the lab is by the kitchen. The kitchen is empty; the cooks took up arms to storm the laboratory. This distracted the supply sergeant, and now he is gone too.”

The Contralmirante didn’t know what to do. To return without the information was utterly unacceptable. But even as the capitan spoke the Contralmirante realized that the office was silent, the undercurrent of activity gone.

“This is the devil’s work,” the capital said, wide-eyed.

“Get up,” the Contralmirante said firmly. “I cannot see the devil, so I do not fear him. But I fear the Almirante.”

The hallway felt narrow. The cinderblock walls were bone white, and the carpet was so soaked in blood than appeared black in the wan light. The gun shook in the Contralmirante’s hand. He had never seen combat, and hadn’t pulled out his gun since boot camp. The Capitan kissed a cross that he had taken from his office. The door to the laboratory was somehow bathed in shadow and light shone through the bullet holes on the door. There was a body on the carpet, the poor doomed private. He had been trampled many times over, a final indignity.

“I can’t hear anything,” the Contralmirante said. “Is anyone still alive in there?”

“Wait,” the capitan said softly. “There is something-“

Sleep escaped Mo for a couple of reasons. There was no air conditioning in his room, that was a luxury reserved for restaurants, public buildings and very pricey hotel suites, and Mo insisted on being at as close to the epicenter of the conflict as possible. The heat however hung around his bedroom like a presence.

There were no clues, at least none that made sense. It had proved impossible to retrieve data from the ship’s black box. The building was mostly abandoned; the laboratory the scene of a massacre, and the remainder of soldiers had apparently become completely maniacal. In the ensuing firefight the room (and the information) had been completely destroyed.

The third reason was Marta the half-Greek bodyguard that Olzabal had said he needed.

When she walked in the room, Mo was surprised to see a woman, but after careful scrutiny he knew what he needed to know. There were fine lines between her eyebrows and the corners of her eyes, old scars, the type boxers get. Her nose was slightly crooked from multiple fractures, and there were delicate scars around her knuckles, marks from punches gone awry. Mo believed that a woman doing a man’s job had to work twice as hard, and he had no doubt that she was far deadlier than he was.

“My name is Mo Rutherford,” he said when they met. “They call me Mo because whenever people give me money, I always want mo’.”

He extended his hand for a handshake. She looked at him the same way the frog looks at the fly.

There were gunshots in the night.

By daybreak he was heading to Perejil Island, a small uninhabited patch of land that contained only goats and parsley. His guess was right; from all sides lay the dead. Birds and rats pulled at rotten flesh, they ignored him as he walked in from the shallow water.

“These bodies have been here for days,” Mo said to himself under his breath. “But there are no dead birds here. The animals are fine, the fish, the birds, everything. So either there was a pathogen released that only affects the human body or we’re looking for the wrong thing completely.”

Behind him Marta was firing her gun at the birds. He looked at her questioningly.

“Those bodies haven’t gotten a decent Christian burial,” she said.

“They are getting a burial,” he replied. “The burial of the rats. Let them be.”

His cell phone rang. It took him a few rings to find it; it was a new suit with a lot of pockets, not the sort he usually wore but the only items of clothing he really cared about were his alligators boots and his specially cut fedora.

“This is Mo,” he said.

“I have news for you, Mr. Rutherford,” Olzabal said.

“Got me new intel,” Mo asked brightly.

“Perhaps,” Olzabal replied. “We have to assume there is a connection. It’s happening again-“

The street was blocked off and people peeked through their curtains and blinds wondering what was going to happen outside. It was a bright day, and the men were sweating beneath the Kevlar. Their hands were at their guns, mostly from habit, but guns weren’t going to help them today. Every now and their scuttling startled the birds who soon returned to their perch on the building.

“What’s in this building,” Mo said to the squad leader.

“It’s a school for the performing arts,” he said. Mo was lucky enough to get someone that spoke decent English. It might be the only luck he was going to get on this trip. He stayed bent over behind a car, even though the knees that had borne a high school and college football career (plus a couple of surgeries) began to protest.

“Olzabal didn’t tell me everything,” Mo started, and the squad leader cut in.

“Things were normal until about noon, “he said. “Then we got an emergency call, they said that there were teachers and students disappearing. By the time we got there, it looks like violence had broken out, we were seeing bodies everywhere-“

“Someone was killing the children,” Mo said in horror.

“The children…the children were killing the teacher. And there’s no child over sixteen years old in that building. We sent a squad in, they secured a couple kids, got them out of the building, and we got the janitorial and kitchen staff out of the boiler room, so we penetrated in deeper and lost contact with the first team. I waited a while and sent another team in and they were killed by gunfire from the first team. They’re all collected to one area of the building. From the plans we have they’re in the teacher’s lounge.”

“So what’s next,” Mo asked. “Tear gas?”

“We’ve already used tear gas. Twice. They shook it off like it was steam from a tea kettle.”

Mo’s cell phone rang again; he walked away from the fray and took Olzabal’s call.

“I am sorry it took me so long to call back,” Olazabal said breathlessly. “I got a call from King Mohammed Ben Al-Hassan’s cabinet. They’re having a similar situation in Morocco, but theirs went badly. They stormed the building after sending in the tear gas, but a fire sparked up. There are major casualties. I don’t know what’s happening Mr. Ruthorford.”

“Start an immediate quarantine on the bodies you have,” Mo said. “Get more scientists from U.N. Let’s not play footsie with the press, recommend an immediate state of emergency and use the occasion to yank their powers. We have to start thinking outside the box here.”

He hung up the phone. Marta looked at him. In that moment, he was more alive than she had ever seen him. With his back against the wall, under pressure, he was thriving, he was loving it. Inside of himself, he was somewhat ashamed. People were dying and more would die. It was not disrespect for the dead he felt. It was just that in mystery he felt the touch of divinity, the feeling that the smothering everyday routine that encompasses us all occasionally lifts and something more mystical, more frightening, enters our lives. It was the sensation of feelings that he had when in the grip of the unknown that he couldn’t replicate anywhere else, that indeed was his addiction and its hold was as intense as any other addict.

Marta frowned, her trained eyes focusing on something that he could not see nor fathom the significance of.

“There,” she said, her eyes cold,” There’s a man hiding in the crevice of a building, watching us all. And he’s crying.”

“I’ll walk towards him,” Mo said. “You flank him so he can’t run. I won’t catch his eye, I’ll just make it seem casual.”

“I’m here to protect you,” she said.

“And I’m here to solve a crime,” he said. “I’m not here to protect myself.”

His answer was good enough for her, and she left quietly. Mo pretended to be on the phone and to seek the privacy of the building. When he got within a hundred yards the man took flight, but Marta had him. He tried to throw a punch, but Marta struck him hard in the middle of his forearm, and he yelled, suddenly unable to close his hand. She punched him with her left hand, right beneath the ribs, to the right of the sternum, directly on the top of his liver and he crumpled in pain, unwilling to fight anymore.

“Don’t hurt him,” Mo said, kneeling in front of the man. “Who are you? Why are you hiding here?”

He responded in Spanish, and Mo looked at Marta hopefully.

“He said he hasn’t done anything. He has a friend in the building, and he is afraid for him.”

Mo relaxed. The man kept talking in his distress.

“He said he’s lost too many friends already, and he just couldn’t bear another one of them dying this way.”

“That’s terrible,” Mo said absentmindedly. His eye was on the phalanx of policemen in front of the school who were now moving with greater urgency.

“Dying what way,” he said finally, thinking of the man had said. Marta was helping him.

“He said his teacher drowned recently.”

Mo thought. It was a longshot but-

“He wasn’t part of the Roquetas de Mar crash was he,” Mo asked.

Marta repeated what he said and the man nodded. Mo’s heart began to beat faster.

“His friend was one of the musicians on the cruise ship,” Marta replied.

Let’s see if we get him somewhere and put his statement on the record,” Mo said.

They made shrimp for him in the police station and it wasn’t until then that he found out that shrimp had heads. He was embarrassed to mention how repulsive he found their bug eyes and long antennae.

The man’s name was Carlos Verona, a native of Majorca, but he lived in Morocco. He was more composed now. Marta was in another room listening to her omnipresent mp3 player. It didn’t detract from her job however, she was aware of everything going on around her at all times, even as she mouthed the words to a song he didn’t know.

Before he entered the room they told him there was an explosion at the school, and that the losses were almost total. The explosion’s cause was unknown.

“What do you do for work Carlos,” he said, and the interpreter repeated him.

Carlos was a musician. He specialized in traditional Mediterranean instruments. His friend was a lyre player on the cruise ship.

“What’s a lyre,” Mo asked. Carlo sat up his chair, unconsciously more interested in the discussion. Some guys love to talk about work.

“It’s a stringed instrument the Greeks used to play. It looks like a small harp, but it’s got a hollow body and two arms from which the catgut strings run and its strummed like a guitar.”

“You use cats for the strings,” Mo said, a little surprised. He was assured that the guts used for the strings were not feline in nature. But Carlos was proud of his lyre, and its traditional trappings.

“There are only a few people in the world that play the lyre in the old style,” he said. “Diego taught me, and a few others, most of his students were in Morocco with us. Most traditional players are from North Africa, so it is a very good place for us.”

When Mo examined the pictures he had asked for, he realized that the instrument one of the dead man held on the Miklos cruise ship was in fact, a lyre.

“So you say your friend was in the music school,” Mo pressed.

“I have received information that he is dead,” Carlos said sadly. “But he was there.”

Mo thought. Perhaps this was the work of terrorists masquerading as musicians and then wreaking havoc. But why would they provide him Carlos? Perhaps Carlos was unaware of what was happening, but why did they pick the targets they picked? He asked a few more questions of Carlos and then left him to the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia personnel since they were interested in both terrorists and North Africa.

“How many do you think there are,” Olzabal asked.

“I don’t know,” Mo said. “There has to be a finite number, after all, they are pretending to be musicians that perform with obscure Greek instruments. I’ve been checking around, and there was recently a growing demand for their services. I got the schedule for their lyre players and you can place one at nearly every incident we’ve had.”

“Even the military complex,” Olzabal asked eagerly.

“Not yet,” Mo replied. “But we’re getting there.”

“You do good work Mr. Rutherford,” Olzabal said. “We’ll pursue the leads you’ve given us. I’ll keep in touch. Perhaps when all this done you could do a little work for us?”

“More work, more money,” Mo said. “That’s why they call me Mo’.”

He hung up. Marta sat at the end of the room, listening to her headphones.

“Good job today,” he said. “It was your eagle eyes that got Carlos. You know someone like you is very useful to someone in my line of business.”

“And what business is that,” she replied.

“Monkey business,” he said with a laugh. “I used to be a corporate spy, worked on a lot of reverse engineering cases, you know, the Coke formula, the KFC herbs and spices, that sort of thing. I was the best, but I did some work on a dessert gone bad and it caught the attention of the FDA. The government started using me for problem-solving and it kind of grew from there.”

She nodded and he looked at her headphones.

“What are you listening to anyway,” he said.

“Kate Bush,” she said. “I’m a huge fan.”

“I like her,” he said. “Used to listen to her a lot in the eighties. I just never understood what the hell she was talking about.”

“What do you mean,” she asked.

“The song on the Red Shoes album,” he said. “I can’t remember it now. She was talking about angels all around her-“

“Oh, Lilly,” she said. “That’s about a ritual her aunt showed her, sort of how to handle stress. Part of the ritual is putting the angels in different directions around her.”

“That’s weird. What about Running up that Hill? Great song but it lost me.”

“Oh that’s talking about what if she could switch bodies with her man so they could communicate better.”

“I would never have got that,” he said. “What’s on now?”

She gave him the earphones. He listened to it with puzzlement.

“Don’t know this one,” he said finally.

“It’s called Experiment Number Four,” she said.

“So we go ahead,” he said mouthing the words,” And the meters are over in the red. It's a mistake in the making. It could feel like falling in love. It could feel so bad. But it could feel so good. It could sing you to sleep-- But that dream is your enemy. That doesn’t make any sense, Marta!”

“This one is easy, Mo,” she said with a laugh. “It’s about scientists who invent a song that could kill someone.”

He gave her back the headphones and shook his head at her. Then it hit him.

He was quiet for a minute. Marta started to think he had had a stroke.

“It all makes sense,” he said finally.

“What are you talking about,” Marta asked.

“The song is killing everyone that hears it,” he said finally. “Its crazy, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“A killer song? That’s was kind of out there even for Kate Bush. You’re not seriously saying-“

“The clues create the answer, no matter how crazy it is. I’ve learned that. But it makes sense with what we know,” he said. “Consider what’s happened so far. Ships mysteriously crash, with a billionaire’s yacht at the epicenter. But the other ships were very close to the yacht, and there was a band playing on the upper deck, where the music would carry across the water. Everyone that heard the music stayed where they were until they died of thirst, the musicians played past the point of normal human endurance and then they died too. Everyone that heard the music that wasn’t on the boat drowned trying to claw their way onto the yacht. We’ve been pulling fingernails out of the hull all week.

When we went to analyze the data, there was audio from the boat. I checked out what happened in the government building. Those mysterious murders happened in the sound lab. As soon as the music got played, everyone that could hear it was mesmerized, including the cooks. And anyone who might have stopped the music because they couldn’t hear it was killed on the spot so that they wouldn’t interrupt the song. That’s why the murders are happening.”

“This doesn’t add up,” Marta said. “There is a whole class of lyre players in Morocco, even though there was one at most of the crime scene, there are other players that have played multiple times without incident. Plus, if the song was lethal, wouldn’t it have killed them during rehearsal? “

But Mo was on the phone already, his mind a whirl. Soon they were in a car, speeding towards where Carlos Verona was detained, Mo nearly mad from waiting for information to be sent towards. Soon there was a phone call from a man that had been sound asleep a half hour earlier.

“You asked which music each student played,” the man said wearily. “Well, there is a pattern. The pieces that were played at each disaster don’t have a composer, aren’t copyrighted, in fact, we don’t know where they came from. I don’t know where you’re going with this but-“

Mo hung up, not wanting to explain himself. Carlos seemed to have been the victim of some abuse by his captors, a detail Mo stored for later. Their techniques were decidedly thuggish. He laid a sheet out in front of Carlos.

“This music,” he asked intensely. “Every time it was played, someone has died. Where did the music come from?”

“I don’t know,” Carlos said, through the interpreter. “You’d have to call Nestor. Some of the men had gotten some music for the new gigs we had. They were desperate for material that sounded authentic. I heard about this, but I didn’t use any.”

“Did they rehearse the material,” Mo asked.

“Usually we practice alone,” Carlos said. “Its hard to find steady accompanying musicians, there is a lot of coming and going.”

Maybe this explained why no one was dying in rehearsal, he thought as they phoned Nestor. Nestor was reluctant to disclose anything over the phone.

“Nestor,” Mo snapped,” I’m calling in behalf of Spain with the full authority of the United States of America. If you do not tell me what I need to know now, I will hunt you like a dog, and pull the truth out of you!”

“It was stolen,” Nestor said. “There was a church that collapsed in Italy, and they found a hidden room beneath it. There was sheet music there, authentic Greek music, and the locals stole it before anyone could claim it. They gave it away for a song, if you’ll pardon the pun. We bought thousand year old songs from shepherds. Some musicians from the class, we bought a folder full of music from one composer, I don’t know who it was thought. It was the most composition a series of pieces for the lyre, the flute and one vocalist. Just the lyre lines alone were beautiful, I practiced one piece for eight hours a day, but we couldn’t find vocalists that could sing their part right.”

“That’s the key,” Mo said. “Its some sort of spell or something. When you have the three pieces and you play the music together it has a captivating effect. Nestor, everyone that has performed that music as it was written has died. I need to know everything about it, and I need to know who is performing the music and where they are.”

“I can get the schedule easily. I can give you the location of the church, and I understand that the hidden room belonged to a monk named Lamonte. The name is rather infamous around these parts but I don’t know why.”

Once the location was received they searched their computer databases. There was a very reputable church that had stood for hundreds of years in Southern Italy that had recently collapsed exposing a chasm beneath its podium. There were the possessions of Lamonte, a displaced French Bible scholar who was eventually tormented, drawn and quartered and then burned for the crime of heresy. Lamonte was an early Christian and in those fledgling years, many made an effort to make their faith more palatable to the pagans by mixing beliefs. Lamonte was open-minded, quite ahead of his time, and made a meticulous study of their beliefs, even sharing and cataloguing their ceremonies. It is here that he fell into disrepute, because rumors began to spread that he had contacted dark gods, and been given things no other man had been given.

Eventually, fear struck the small village that he lived in, and he was arrested and tortured, but he remained mute under duress. No one knew precisely what he had done, or where his defilements had occurred. Mo continued to scan the articles. Marta cursed in Greek and pointed to something on the screen.

“It is said,” Mo read, “That the Gods presented Lamonte a gift no other man had ever received – the music of the sirens.”

“Do you know what that means,” Marta said, composure lost. “The Sirens were Goddesses, the ones that taught the birds how to sing, the daughters of the river, cursed to be monsters after they failed to save Persephone. There were three of them, Thelchtereia, Aglaope, and Peisinoe. One played the lyre, one sang and another played the flute. Whoever heard their song was cursed to be mesmerized and sailors would wreck their ships on the rocks to be closer to song of the sirens. It was prophesied when any ship was able to sail past their island without succumbing to the sweet song, the Sirens would be free of their curse. Odysseus was the first to escape them because he blocked his men's ears with beeswax, and made them tie him to the foot of the mast so he could not be seduced by their song. When they passed, the curse was lifted, but the sirens were turned into birds and they flew away.”

“So help me God, it’s crazy but it adds up,” Mo said. “I never thought I’d believe a story with magic killer music, and goddesses turned into pigeons from hell or whatever.”

“We’re getting another fax,” she said.

“It’s the schedule,” he said, reaching for the paper.

Basil went over the arrangements again even as the guests arrived. He laughed when the Lays entered; they had hired a chariot pulled by horses and some rather docile lions on a chain. They truly had the spirit of the party down. Janis as usual, looked worried.

“Basil,” she said. “Do you think we’re safe here? There has been a great deal of accidents lately.”

“We’re quite safe my dear,” he said. “I’ve an exceptional security team. They’re mostly mercenaries, U.N. counter-terrorism experts that helped train the Muslims in Bosnia, Desert War veterans and so on. I have snipers in the adjacent buildings, and my men are carrying MP-5N Heckler and Kochs, they’re very good close range guns. This building is deceptively secure and there are stores of ammunition here. I daresay we could repel any invader for a number of days. I don’t know of any party that’s that so well armed. One moment, my dear.”

He escaped her clutches, and hugged Helena tightly.

“Helena,” he cried. “What a pleasure! I didn’t think you could make it. I hope you will sing for us later?”

“Everywhere I go Basil,” she said, “I must sing for my supper. Very well.”

“Wonderful,” he said.

In the orchestra pit, there was a flurry of movement. There needed to be a piece prepared for the transcendent talent of Helena. The harp player came forward with a piece of music.

“Perhaps this,” he said. “It’s for flute, and lyre which I also play. I didn’t know of a vocalist that could perform it. I don’t know that she’ll need much rehearsal of it either-“

The decision was made. Later that evening after a private read through, Helena took the stage. The expectorant crowd included the cooks from the kitchen, the servers, the security guards and others. The lyre began to strum, sending a ripple of pleasure down her spine. The flute began a counter melody, and tears welled in her eyes. There are only eleven musical notes, but she almost felt like her vocal line would add more, notes that man had no idea how to play, a touch of something divine almost.

For some reason, she looked past the crowd, through the massive windows that lead outside. There were birds beginning to flock to the building, en masses, almost like they were listening as well. She blocked that all out. She allowed the sensations to overtake her, and then she began to sing.