As soon as Grande walked through the doorway to the waiting room, Micah’s training kicked in.
He sprinted across the room in three bounds and leaped, rolling over the desk and dropping to the carpeting beside Kylie, his arms covering his head as gunshots slammed into the door. He grabbed her, wrapping himself around her as much as he could.
The shooting stopped.
Yelling and pounding took their place, though muffled by the heavy materials of the walls and door.
Micah asked her, “Are you all right? None of those bullets came through the walls, did they?” He’d counted on the walls being reinforced.
Kylie looked at herself and him, her dark eyes expanded and terrified. “I think I’m okay. Are you okay?”
“Fine. Let’s go.”
Her frantic whisper hissed near his ear. “What the hell did you do, Micah? I thought you said you weren’t an art thief!”
“I’m not.” He reached inside the waistband of his trousers and came out with a thumb drive, blue-and-white with a regular USB connector this time, and jammed it into a port on the computer tower under Grande’s desk where they were hiding. He jumped to his feet. “But like hell I’m going to leave an undiscovered Leonardo da Vinci painting in the hands of a Philly godfather. It belongs to the world.”
The image of the security dashboard on the monitor pulsed, and the thumb drive whined.
Kylie whispered, “I can’t do this. He knows where my sister is! He’ll go after her to punish me!”
“We can secure your sister.” He gestured at the thumb drive. “I’m cloning his disk right now. If information about her is on this hard drive, we’ll know it.” And then maybe Arthur and his people could find the sister.
“I can’t take that chance!”
“Too late now. I promise you that we’ll find her. I already have someone looking for her because I didn’t know she existed before you mentioned her.”
“I swear to God, if anything happens to Rachele, I will burn you. I will put you in a cement overcoat and dump you in the Schuylkill River. I mean it.”
Interesting that she was so specific. “Why did Don Grande call you Chiarina? Is that your real name?” Micah turned his head and looked at her. “Wait a minute, you’re Chiarina Merlino, Joseph Merlino’s daughter. That’s why you were in so tight with Grande. Dammit, ‘Kylie Miller,’ I should’ve figured that out.”
Kylie kept yelling at him. “And why do you keep calling him Don Grande? Only people who are mobbed up call the boss Don. And where did that English accent come from, Micah, and where did it go now? And the Annunciation isn’t by Leonardo da Vinci. It’s by Lorenzo di Credi.”
Micah flipped his hand, and another thumb drive jumped into his palm, released from a spring-loaded holster up his sleeve. He crouched and jammed the new one, black and silver, into a second port on the tower.
The first thumb drive flashed a green light, so Micah yanked it out and pushed the button on the back, juggling it from palm to palm as it burned in his hand.
The banging on the door intensified, the heavier thumps of someone or several people driving against the door with their shoulders.
Kylie ran around the desk and started dragging the heavy office chairs toward the door.
While the second thumb drive did its work, Micah gestured at the second painting on the floor, which he’d also popped out of its frame. “That other painting is The Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci. It was thought that only sketches existed and he’d never painted it. But that’s definitely it.”
“You know a hell of a lot more about art than you pretend to,” Kylie said while scooting the heavy chairs to the door to brace against it. Her feet slid on the carpet while she moved the furniture.
Micah laughed. “And they said being an art history major in college wouldn’t pay off. I’ve found it exceedingly lucrative.”
The door thumped again, harder.
Kylie startled and wedged one of the chair backs under the doorknob. “Micah, I don’t think that’s going to hold.”
The light of the second thumb flashed green, and Micah tapped the button on the back to disable it. He stuck it in his trouser pocket just a little too soon, and it toasted his left nut. “Ouch.”
Dammit, that was going to leave a mark.
He whipped a nylon bag out of the satchel and laid a sheet of padded silk between the two paintings, then he stuffed the two wooden panels into the bag and zipped it up. The two square panels built of poplar wood were two feet across, but they weighed less than twenty pounds together.
Kylie was shoving one of the tall bookcases away from the wall, rocking the shelves and swinging the ends as she walked them across the middle of the room. “I don’t know how you think we’re going to get out of here. They’ll shoot us as soon as they break down that door.”
The bookcase was far enough away that it wouldn’t hit Micah when it fell over. “We’re not going through the door,” Micah said, shucking his suit jacket off behind himself. He ripped open his shirt, and the buttons bounced off the desk and rolled onto the floor.
Kylie raised an eyebrow at him as she struggled and her feet slid on the carpeting. “I would’ve bet that would’ve been my job.”
He yanked off the shirt, exposing the Kevlar bulletproof vest and a leather harness that went over his shoulders and around his chest and waist.
She raised her other dark eyebrow and toppled the bookcase so that it landed on the chairs wedged against the door, lending additional weight to the barricade. “Look, bozo, I knew you were kinky, but people are trying to kill us out there. We don’t have very long before they break into this room. I’m not willing to go out in flagrante delicto.”
Micah grabbed a disk the size of a hockey puck from his satchel and slapped it onto the window, pressing the button to arm the device with the side of his finger as he leaped away. He ran around the desk and gathered Kylie under his arm, shielding her as the disk popped, showering them with safety glass cubes and spider-webbing the window with cracks.
The glass pane peeled down the window frame and fell off outside.
“Oh, no. No way,” Kylie said. “We’re on the fourth floor. There is no way I’m going out the—”
Micah pulled the backpack straps of the bag with the paintings over his shoulders. “Come on!”
“I am not—”
He pulled another device from the bag and slapped it over the window pane, grabbing Kylie and turning her away from the window. He wrapped his arms and body around hers.
The device blasted with a bang. Plaster and drywall pattered as it fell to the carpeting and on the desk.
The door clattered harder, and cracks threaded in the plaster surrounding it.
Micah grabbed the rope and some clips from his bag, pulling Kylie to stand beside the broken-out window. He flipped some leather strips down from the harness and snapped them around his thighs.
Darkness was gathering outside as the sun descended below the horizon.
Kylie ran back to the desk and started stuffing her money down her shirt. “I said there’s no way—”
He ignored her and grabbed her back to him. Her arms reached for the stacks of cash still lying on Salvatore Grande’s desk as he unsnapped a leather cinch from around his torso, flipping it around Kylie’s bendy wasp-waist and hugging her against him to buckle it around himself. He yanked the hostage-rescue device tight.
The door frame gave out, wooden molding scattering over the carpet. Exposed bolts radiated around the door, and the men’s shouts sounded much closer.
But the heavy chairs and bookcases that Kylie had used to barricade the door held, and the men outside couldn’t open the door more than an inch.
Gunshots blasted.
Bullets blew chunks out of the ceiling and walls.
Kylie grabbed the leather harness over his shoulders with both hands, just like she should. “No, no, absolutely not—”
Micah threaded the descender through the rope and clipped it onto the anchor now embedded through the wall. He threw one leg over the windowsill. Broken glass bit the back of his thigh through the fine wool of his suit trousers.
Dammit, he’d liked the suit.
Salvatore’s enforcers were kicking the door, shoving the stacked chairs and bookcases a fraction of an inch with each slam.
Kylie was watching, too, her eyes wide, and she grabbed him hard even though she was insisting that there was no way she was jumping out of the window.
Micah hauled Kylie over the edge of the windowsill as she protested, though she was clinging to the straps and already had one leg wrapped around his waist. He said, “That’s a good girl. Hang on tight.”
They toppled out of the window just as the door from the waiting room blasted open, scattering the chairs and bookcases. Salvatore, Tony Fava, and the others began clambering over the barricade and into the room.
As Micah and Kylie fell over the window’s edge, Micah yelled, “My name is Marcu Argento. Vincent Genovese sends his regards!”
His native New York accent echoed in his ears as they descended.
Kylie asked him, “What the hell was that?”
Micah grinned as they slid down the rope. “I just started a Mafia war.”