by Ally Carter
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!"
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"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.
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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 . . .
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"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
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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
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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 t
he 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."
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CHAPTER 33
Everything had gone almost exactly according to plan. Or at least that's what the various members of the Henley's security department told themselves.
The entire building had been evacuated in less than four minutes. The fire itself had been contained to a single wing of the Henley's six sections. A hallway, really, located far away from the major exhibits like the Renaissance room and Impressionist gallery. So now the Henley's only fear was minor smoke damage to minor paintings.
If any of the members of the staff had stopped to think about it, they might have wondered how the smoke-to-fire ratio had been so strangely high to begin with, but they didn't. Instead, they patted themselves on the back and looked forward to bonuses and commendations once word of their quick thinking
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and clear resolve reached the powers that be.
Far away from the Romani Room, locked inside the Henley's security annex, they watched the various exhibits through an eerie haze, not noticing that the feed was nothing but a continuous loop; not seeing the Bagshaw brothers and Simon as they made their way down the empty hallways toward a door that was certainly locked--a wing the guards were sure was abandoned.
No one in the guard room saw Simon raise his hand and knock. Not a soul noticed when Gabrielle pushed open the door to the Henley's second best exhibit. She studied the trio and said, "You're late."
The paintings were there.
Kat held them in her gloved hands. She saw them through her goggled eyes. It was not a dream or a mirage--they were there. And yet she couldn't let herself believe it.
"Two and a half minutes," Simon warned as Kat walked past the four frameless canvases that leaned against the wall like the artists' stalls on the streets of New York and Paris. It wasn't hard to imagine that she'd gone back in time a few hundred years and was looking at the works of a few unknowns, guys named Vermeer and Degas.
Nick had taken off his blazer and tie and was now hurrying around the hot room, packing, preparing for the next phase, but one painting remained, and as Kat eased toward it, she could feel the seconds passing, and something else . . . hope? Fear?
But the feeling that mattered most was the massive whoosh of rushing air that was suddenly cascading through the vents, blowing across Kat's face and through her hair as she reached toward the final painting and then stopped, looked up, and
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heard a familiar voice say, "Hello, Kitty Kat."
Gabrielle's hair should have been tousled as she hung upside down, dangling from an air duct twenty feet above the ground. Her face should have been smudged. It was one of life's great injustices, in Kat's opinion, that some girls could crawl through two hundred feet of ductwork and come out on the other side looking even more glamorous for the adventure. But the single most remarkable thing about Kat's cousin in that moment was the look on her face as she scanned the row of paintings and whispered, "It's them."
Kat and Nick ripped off their oxygen masks. They tossed their goggles aside. Fresh air was rushing past Gabrielle, filling the gallery, as Kat moved toward the last painting and reached carefully for the pressure switch. Despite the fresh air, Kat held her breath as she eased the final painting from the wall, turned it over, and heard her cousin say, "Uh-oh."
The scene outside the Henley was exactly what one might expect under these circumstances. Shrill sirens filled the air as fire trucks and police cars raced down the cobblestone streets and blocked off a perimeter around the main entrances.
Though the security team swore that the fire had been contained, black smoke still escaped from doors and windows, and then faded into the winter breeze.
The dusty snow had turned to drizzle, so reporters stood under umbrellas as they broadcast the story around the world.
The Henley was burning. And it seemed that all of London had come out to watch the fire.
Gregory Wainwright saw his career dangling by a thread. And yet there was little else he could do while the firefighters scrambled off their trucks and school children
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huddled together on the sidewalks for roll call. And so the director maintained his distance from the crowd, standing with the young billionaire and his uncle, making small talk-- making allies.
"Well, it was nice seeing you again, Mr. Wainwright," Hale said, trying to pull away. "If you'll excuse me, I really must attend to my uncle."
"Oh, dear!" the director exclaimed. "Mr. Hale! Forgive me. I completely forgot. Here"--he looked around as if expecting a wheelchair to magically appear out of thin air--"allow me to find you someplace to rest. Perhaps I can send one of the firemen to retrieve your chair--"
"No!" Hale and Marcus blurted in unison.
"I'm fine," Marcus said again with a dismissive wave of his hand. "I have many just like it. And you have quite enough to worry ..." Marcus turned to survey the still-smoking building, the crowds of tourists with their flashing cameras, and the journalists with their plastic smiles. "It does make a man wonder if that Visily Romani business was really nothing after all."
Hale looked at Marcus, but the older man didn't meet his gaze. Instead he tucked his hand into the lapel of his coat in the way he'd seen men of wealth do for the majority of his life. "But I suppose you cannot be blamed if two disasters happen within a month."
Hale watched the director's eyes narrow, first with resentment, then puzzlement.
"Coincidences happen," Marcus carried on, but Wainwright was already doing the math, calculating the odds of a fire and thief coming to the most secure museum in the world within weeks of each other.
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"I'm sorry, Mr. Hale." The director pulled out his cell phone and set off at a frantic clip. He paused briefly to call over his shoulder, "Please call my assistant about the Monet!"
And, with that, Gregory Wainwright was gone.
"It's not here," Kat said flatly as she stared at the back of the final frame.
"Kat," Simon said through her earpiece, "I'm hearing chatter on the security frequencies. I think--"
But Kat wasn't listening. She was too busy looking at the place where the final painting was supposed to be . . . but wasn't.
" Girl Praying to Saint Nicholas . . . Girl Praying to Saint Nicholas was supposed to be there!" Kat looked up, past Nick's worried eyes. She completely ignored her cousin, who dangled gracefully from the vent, manipulating a long wire. Instead, Kat's eyes scanned the room, counting, "One, two, three--"
"Kat!" Nick snapped.
"It's not here," Kat said numbly, still staring at the frame in her hands.
"Kat!" he yelled, and this time she met his gaze. "It's not here."
Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe Visily Romani had hidden the fifth painting behind a different frame, and it was up to Kat to use her last few seconds to choose one and choose wisely.
"It's not--" Kat started again.
But then she saw it--the small white card that was secured to the back of the frame by a single piece of tape in the very place where Girl Praying to Saint Nicholas was supposed to be.
Visily Romani had been here.
Visily Romani had done this.
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Visily Romani had left a trail, and Kat had followed. She'd been more determined than Uncle Eddie, and braver than her father, and more clever than the cleverest minds at Scotland Yard. She had come so far, and standing there, watching her cousin drag four priceless paintings through the air and into the heating duct, it should have been the proudest moment of her life. But all Kat could do was stare and say, "It's not here."
She
traced the raised black letters of the business card.
"Kat." Nick's voice was in her ear. His hand tugged gently on her arm. "Kat, it's time."
Time, the greatest thief of all. So Kat didn't stop to ponder the question of the fifth painting's fate.
Instinct and breeding and a lifetime's worth of training were taking over as Kat ran to the empty hook on the wall and replaced the final frame.
She turned and saw Gabrielle dragging Raphael's Prodigal Son by a cable, easing it inside the heating duct just as Simon yelled, "Guys, you are out of time. Get in or--"
"Here!" Nick screamed. He cupped his hands, ready to boost her up to reach the vent, but Kat didn't take his offer.
Instead she reached down and picked up the burgundy blazer and tie where Nick had left them. As she ran her hand over the small, custom-made patch that Gabrielle had hand-sewn over the pocket, she found the words she'd said to Hale coming back to her. "Why are you doing this, Nick?"
"Guys!" Simon warned.
"Why, Nick?" she asked, moving closer. "Just tell me . . . why."
"I ... I needed a job."
"No," Kat said simply. She shook her head and, without wasting another second, clutched the blazer to her chest with
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her left hand and grabbed the wire's end with her right. And suddenly she was flying, rising through the air toward the vent.
Once she was securely inside, she looked back at Nick, standing on the ground beneath her.
"Throw me the cable, Kat," he said, staring up at her with an unwavering gaze, and Kat realized she hadn't seen eyes like that since Paris--since the day Amelia Bennett had come to take Bobby Bishop to jail.
"You look like her, you know?" she said, staring down at him.
"Kat," he said again, harsher now. "Throw down the cable."