“That piece of rubbish!” Marcus snapped.
Again, Hale found her gaze. I need to talk to you, he seemed to scream.
Get control of Marcus, she wanted to scream back.
“Now, at my chateau I’ve got a lovely little Cezanne— Cezanne was a real artist,” Marcus was saying, and the curator nodded encouragingly; but before the lie could go any further, a screaming siren filled the room.
Kat’s first thought was, We’re done for.
Her next thought was to glance around the room and see the cloud of dark smoke that was sweeping through the doorway, toward the precious paintings.
She couldn’t hear a thing over the wail of the sirens. All she could see through the smoke was the Henley’s director grabbing his two VWPs (very wealthy people) and pushing them toward the doors.
Suddenly, guards were everywhere. Docents appeared as if through the walls. Kat was caught in the current—just another body being pushed toward the exits, forced closer to the smoke and the wailing sirens and the even more crowded hall.
Hale turned to look behind him, searching the crowd and finding her one last time. But Gregory Wainwright had a grip on his arm, and Hale was gone with the current, washed away on a wave of fear.
“This way!” the man said, dragging Hale and Marcus along.
“But my chair,” Marcus finally remembered to say, but the museum’s director didn’t hear him; the exhibits were already locking down. And the moment for turning back was long since gone.
Chapter 32
Kat had always heard that if there was one thing the great museums of the world feared more than theft, it was fire. In that moment, she didn’t doubt it. The pulsing sirens were even louder than when Gabrielle had lain unconscious on the floor. Children screamed. Tourists ran. People crushed against each other in the smoke and chaos, rushing toward the front doors and the fresh wintry air outside.
And that is probably why the director of the Henley didn’t notice the boy who pressed against him, fighting through the crowd. He reached into the man’s interior jacket pocket for the small plastic card, freeing him of that particular burden as the crowd pushed on. Then he found his way through the smoky haze to the Romani Room, and the girl who stood waiting.
“Not bad,” Kat mouthed as the boy silently swiped the card through the reader. A red light turned green. The automatic locks were overridden quietly. And Nick smiled and mouthed, “Thanks.”
As Kat stepped inside the Romani Room, she smelled the trace of smoke that still hung in the air. She heard the roar of sirens fade behind the massive airtight and fireproof doors as they locked into place. She knew that there was only one way out.
Despite the flashing red emergency lights, the room was beautiful—the glossy floor, the glistening frames, and, of course, the paintings. There were no guards between Kat and those priceless works. No staring docents or tacky tourists.
Kat started to take a step forward, but a hand caught her arm.
“Not yet,” Nick said. He glanced up at the security camera, and Kat remembered the blind spot. She glanced at the floor and thought about the sensors.
She waited.
“Any second now,” Simon said through her earpiece.
“This year would be good,” Nick replied.
“You can’t rush greatness, guys,” Simon chided back, and Kat thought he sounded a tad too cocky for a boy who was currently operating out of the third bathroom stall on the left.
Suddenly, the red glow of the emergency lights was replaced by a pulsing blue light. “Simon!” Kat cried. “Rush something!”
A new siren—softer but somehow twice as menacing— sounded, coursing through the room.
“Simon! We’ve got to move. Now!”
“Just a second,” he said.
But Kat didn’t care about the encryption that was currently keeping them at bay. She was far more concerned about the spinning blue lights and the mechanical voice that was counting down, saying, “Fire-protection measures will take effect in FIVE. FOUR . . .”
“Simon!” Kat cried.
“Just one—”
“We don’t have a second!” Kat yelled just as the lights stopped spinning and a sound more terrifying than any siren pierced the air.
“Of course it is!” Gregory Wainwright shouted. A cell phone was trained to his ear, but his gaze stayed fixed on the two billionaires (or, more accurately, one billionaire and one butler) who stood five feet away, watching dark smoke spiral into a pale gray sky.
The Henley, after all, was burning. And all Gregory Wainwright could do was stand at a safe distance, yelling at the fire.
Hale felt the man staring, recognized the forced authority in his voice as he barked, “Absolutely! You should do that.”
Hale turned his back against the cold wind and tried not to think about the smoke, the fire, and most of all . . .
“Kat,” he whispered, silently cursing himself. He should have forced her to talk to him. He should have left Marcus, abandoned his role—made Kat listen to what Uncle Eddie’d had to say. But it was too late. He was stuck outside with the director while she was locked in there. With Nick. And right now Hale was as useless as Wainwright as he stood out in the cold, trying to pinpoint the moment when it all went wrong.
It was a good plan, wasn’t it? They had been prepared, hadn’t they? Or maybe not. A crew is only as strong as its weakest link, after all. Maybe they had been reckless and stupid and careless. Maybe Uncle Eddie had been right. Maybe this was simply what happened to people who dared to take on Visily Romani.
“Now, now, Mr. Hale.” The director placed a comforting hand on Hale’s shoulder. “There’s no need to worry. I assure you, our fire-protection measures are state of the art.”
“That is a relief,” Hale muttered.
“In fact, that was my head of security on the phone just now,” the director said. “He assures me that the affected area was completely evacuated.” But then Gregory Wainwright seemed to notice the concern this news brought to Hale’s eyes. “Don’t worry, Mr. Hale. Our fire-protection measures will be activated any second now.”
“What kind of measures would those be?” Marcus asked.
The director chuckled. “Well, we can’t use your common garden hose, now, can we? The water would do as much harm to a three-hundred-year-old painting as the smoke and fire would. Instead, we simply suck all the oxygen out of the room. Without oxygen, any fire dies.”
The director’s phone rang again. He turned to take it while Hale’s gaze turned back to the museum, his thoughts on the girl still stuck inside, with the boy who would never be a member of the family.
Kat knew the change was coming before she heard the terrible sucking sound.
“Simon . . .” she said again, fighting the urge to run across the room before she heard Simon yell . . .
“Now! The cameras are blind. You’re clear.”
Kat didn’t need to be told twice. She felt Nick at her elbow as they ran side by side down the length of the long exhibit hall to where the wheelchair sat, abandoned.
She fumbled with the straps that held the oxygen tanks to Marcus’s chair.
“You’ve got less than six seconds until you’re out of air, guys,” Simon warned as Kat tossed a tank toward Nick. “Four seconds,” Simon said as the hissing, sucking sound grew louder.
The room had grown darker, the paintings somehow fuzzy. And as the floor began to spin, Kat fell to her knees and marveled at what an excellent security measure a spinning floor made.
“Kat!” Simon screamed her name.
She heard Nick drop the canister. It smashed against his toe and toppled onto the hard floor.
“The masks!” Simon yelled, and something about the word made her notice the long plastic tubes in her hands— see the strange masks protruding from a pouch on the back of Marcus’s chair.
Kat was supposed to be doing something, she was sure, but she suddenly felt so sleepy—the masks seemed so far away.
“Kat!” Simon yelled again. She summoned her last ounce of strength, placed the first mask over her mouth, and drew in the pure oxygen.
The floor stopped spinning.
The paintings suddenly seemed beautiful again.
While Kat surveyed the room, Nick carefully unscrewed pieces of the wheelchair. As he tipped the metal tubes, a variety of tools slid into his palms. They both kept goggles secured over their eyes, and their breathing masks over their mouths, so there was no talking as Nick placed a tool into her hands, and Kat walked to the first painting, Flowers on a Cool Spring Day.
In the past week, Kat had come to love the combination of colors in the blossoms, the play of the light. It was not Henley’s most prized possession, but Kat found it beautiful in a soothing way. Yet nothing would ever be as beautiful as what Kat hoped lay behind it.
She looked at Nick. Despite the rush of pure oxygen, she felt frozen.
It’s back there, she told herself. Almost involuntarily, she reached to touch the place where Visily Romani’s business card had mysteriously appeared in the middle of the night ten days before.
Something is back there, her heart seemed to say.
It could be a trap, her mind wouldn’t let her forget.
Nick held up his digital watch; the display was bright in the dim room, counting backward from five minutes. A physical reminder of what neither of them could afford to forget—they didn’t have all day.
As Kat gripped a pair of needle-nose pliers in her hand, she looked at her right arm, expecting to see a tremble, praying her three months at Colgan hadn’t taken this from her too— but her gloved hand was steady as it moved to the top of the painting’s ornate frame and found the pressure sensor. Nick handed her a piece of Silly Putty, and she pressed it against the small button that she could not see.
Needle-nose pliers and Silly Putty, Kat thought. Ain’t technology grand?
Preparing to move the painting from the wall was the easy part. It was as simple as spraying a spritz of air across the back of the frame, double-checking for additional sensors, then reaching for the painting and easing it from the wall.
The hard part was fighting the overwhelming sensation that she might have been wrong; it might have been a goose chase, a prank—the greatest con Visily Romani had ever pulled.
“Kat?” Simon’s voice was in her ear. “Hurry it up. Beta team is in position.”
But Kat couldn’t rush. She could barely breathe as she lifted the frame, peeled back the canvas, and came face-to-face with a ghost, a painting behind the painting. An image that was anything but Flowers on a Cool Spring Day.
She’d seen it before, of course. Once on a video feed and once in a picture. But as Nick carefully replaced the other painting in its frame and returned it to the wall, all Kat could do was stare at the two boys who were still running through haystacks, chasing a straw hat and a strong breeze through decades and across a continent.
Nick searched her eyes. Kat watched him mouth the words “What’s wrong?” But Kat was thinking about Abiram Stein, whispering even if only for herself, “I know someone who has been looking for this.”
Chapter 33