Billionaires Prefer Blondes (23 page)

It was like throwing a snake into a pit full of mice. Everybody scattered away from the grenade as she sprinted past it, holding her breath. Moving fast, she threw another grenade into the music room and used that corridor as a shortcut. At
least the crowds were thinning fast—that was what she needed. Samantha only slowed long enough to dimly see that the Stradivarius remained safely behind glass. It should have been, since it was her responsibility to take it, but if one of the other crew members had done the job, it would mean her cover was blown.

At the joint doorway to the European and American wings she spliced another receiver into the circuit board, then covered the other two main American gallery entrances the same way. Maybe it wasn’t necessary, maybe Interpol and the FBI and the NYPD had everything under control, but it didn’t sound like it. And she wasn’t willing to risk her future on the theory that they could outwit Nicholas Veittsreig and Martin Jellicoe on a few hours’ notice. They were probably still arguing over who would lead the exercise.

Just as she finished with the last circuit board, Martin appeared through the smoke, a large black tube over his shoulder. He had the Leutze painting.
Washington Crossing the Delaware
was about to disappear from public view forever.

“Sam, what the hell are you doing here?” he snapped. “Get the damned Strad before—”

“FBI! Freeze!”

Great.
Now
they showed. A tall guy in a dark suit materialized around an exhibit a few feet from Martin. He held a pistol in his hands. It was aimed at her dad, but his gaze was split between Martin and her, standing just outside the gallery.

“Get over here, lady. Now!”

Okay, time was up. She took one second for a single deep breath. “You set us up, Martin,” she said loudly. “Damn you!”

With that, she thumbed the remote.

A few inches in front of her the heavy, fireproof metal door crashed down from the ceiling, closing Martin and the
FBI guy inside. Refusing to acknowledge the guilt that flooded through her, she dug into her pocket and sprinted around the corner. She yanked a shrieking, confused woman out of the next doorway and triggered that door. It slammed into the floor.

“Get going, lady,” she snapped, shoving the woman toward the stairs.

“Thank you, thank y—”

Samantha sprinted off again. “Four to go,” she coughed, rounding into another corridor. The remotes had pretty good range, but there was a lot of metal in the museum walls, and she didn’t want to risk one of the doors not closing. She could have shut them the instant she popped the circuit boxes, but all of the tourists hadn’t been out and safe. Hopefully by now all but the bad guys and the white hats had made it to the stairs. If she could help it, she didn’t want to provide hostages.

A pair of men, one carrying a walkie-talkie and both armed, charged into the European Paintings gallery as she went in to trigger the joint door. She ducked under a bench as they passed her.
Crap
. Rising again, she moved up behind them.

“Hey,” she said.

As the closest one turned to face her, she slapped the backpack into his chest, sending him backward through the joint door and into the American wing. The second one grabbed her arm, and she twisted, slamming the flat of her foot into his knee. He stumbled into the first one as that guy lifted his gun.

“You fucking freeze right there, la—”

She flicked the remote, and the door slammed closed, separating her from them. Adrenaline flooded her muscles as she turned and ran again. That sealed at least three guns in with
Nicholas and Martin, and separated them from Bono and Dolph.

It also left her inside the European gallery with two exits still to close down. The smoke was so thick she could barely see two feet in front of her. Dodging through the Greek paintings exhibit, she nearly stepped on an El Greco, and she slowed down a little bit. Veittsreig hadn’t been kidding when he’d said they were going to cause chaos.

Hopefully making the mess had slowed them down enough for her to trap them in the gallery. The
Toledo
painting wasn’t there, though, so one of the Germans had wrapped it up already. Shit. They’d better still be in the gallery. If she couldn’t get out before they did, she would either have to risk letting them get away, or close herself in with them.

As she reached the second gallery exit, Bono rounded the Italian exhibit door on her right. “Sam, let’s go,” he barked.

“Hold on. I heard a police radio out there,” she improvised.

He lifted the gun he held. “No problem.” Bono started through the main gallery door.

Thinking fast, Samantha grabbed his shoulder. “Wait. Let me go first. I look more innocent than you do.”

“Hurry it up.”

Nodding, she stepped through the door, then sent it crashing down so close behind her that it tore the backpack off her shoulder. Behind her a gun went off. Bono was pissed. She hiked up her backpack again.

That left just Dolph unaccounted for, and then she could make a run for it. She tore back through the Music Room and dodged out through the shop, heading for the final rigged door that joined the two. Right behind her the elevator opened.

“Stop right there!”

Samantha kept moving. With a deep pop a bullet hit the shop wall behind her head, obliterating a Monet poster. Yelping, she ducked, diving past twin racks of postcards. Christ. Obviously Gorstein hadn’t told anybody about her. As she drew even with the last European Paintings gallery door, she hit the final remote. The door fell—and stopped two feet above the floor.

“Dammit.”

She backpedaled. In the rush to escape, somebody had knocked over a bookcase and a third postcard rack. The door wheezed and groaned, slowly crushing the piles of lumber and wire and hardcover museum guides. “Close, close, close,” she chanted under her breath, kicking books out of the way.

A hand reached through the narrowing gap, grabbing her ankle. Off balance, she went down.

Nicholas Veittsreig rolled under the door. A second later, with a splintering crack, the two-ton behemoth hit the floor.

Scrambling away on her bottom, Samantha tried to jerk her ankle free.
Shit
. He must have traded places with Dolph. Nicholas didn’t let her go. “Bitch,” he breathed, twisting onto all fours and yanking her beneath him.

Samantha doubled up her legs and then pistoned them straight up. With a grunt he tumbled sideways. She rolled, and her backpack caught on one of the postcard racks. She pulled on it. Hard.

The rack tumbled across Veittsreig’s back, sending him to the floor again. Giving up on the backpack, Samantha slipped free of the last strap, stumbled back to her feet, and ran for it.

She reached the top of the stairs, armed guys behind her. She hoped a couple of them had at least stopped to nab Nicholas—if they even noticed him amid the wreckage. Halfway down the first landing, half a dozen men with “Interpol”
bands on their arms climbed toward her. Speeding up and sending up a quick, wordless prayer, she launched herself into the air.

As she hit bodies, she grabbed the railing beside them, pushed off again, and flipped over the edge. She dropped to the first flight of stairs, landing hard and off balance. A dozen guys yelled into radios and mikes, and she could hear more boots charging around below as she rolled down the last few stairs to the lobby floor.

She did one more roll onto her feet and sprinted along the wall, ignoring the pain of what was probably a twisted ankle. As she took it in, time seemed to slow. For a second it looked as though she’d stumbled into the middle of the skyscraper climax scene from
The Blues Brothers
. Cops and guns and chaos, screaming tourists running for the doors, packages and brochures flying everywhere, and her in the middle.

Enough of the white hats had seen her now that she needed to be someone else. Samantha ducked behind a granite trash can and yanked off her wig and her black button shirt. She wore a red T-shirt underneath, selected because it looked touristy, and made sure it was tucked in. Dumping the excess garments into the trash and running her fingers through her tangled hair, she pasted a look of confused, tearful terror onto her face and stood.

A big guy with “FBI” on his chest approached her, a semiautomatic cradled efficiently in his arms. “Hold it, lady,” he barked.

She lifted her hands, not having to fake their shaking. He could think it was fear; she knew it was adrenaline. “What’s going on?” she cried. “I was in the restroom, and the lights went out, and everybody started screaming.”

He lowered the gun a fraction. “There’s been a robbery,”
he said. “Please move through the exit, and someone will take your statement.”

“I left my purse in the res—”

“We’ll get it for you later.”

He moved past her, and she headed for the distant exit. “Thank y—”

Somebody hit her in the middle of the back, shoving her into a marble pedestal. Dazed, she squirmed onto her back. The muzzle of a pistol shoved into her mouth, cutting her gums. Veittsreig.

“I’ve got you now,” he panted. “Interpol!” he shouted, flashing a phony badge as attention turned in their direction.

As he yanked her to her feet, he shoved something hard and heavy into her waistband. A fucking gun. Christ. He was going to shoot her in front of everybody. And they would see that she was armed, and it would be a righteous kill, and then he’d walk out the door, find Rick, and murder him, too.

“Where’s the bomb?” he yelled, shoving her backward with the gun still in her mouth and tilting her head back. “Where’s the bomb? Everybody out!”

It worked. Everybody began hauling ass for the exit as “bomb” echoed through the hazy lobby.

“Goodbye, Sam,” he murmured, and pulled the trigger.

Tuesday, 5:33 p.m.

S
amantha flung herself sideways as Nicholas squeezed the trigger.

In that same second, a large, hazy figure swept out of the shadows and struck Veittsreig across the head with something big and heavy.
Rick
.

Fire blazed across her left cheek even with the sound of gunfire still echoing through the lobby. Samantha rolled, staggering back to her feet. The noise so close to her head made her ears ring.

Veittsreig collapsed in a heap, Rick standing over him with a Roman bronze bowl clutched in his fist. For a moment he looked like he wasn’t finished with Nicholas.

“Rick?” she said, wobbling.

He faced her. For the first time she noticed that he wore a fake moustache and long sideburns. “Come on,” he said, grabbing her arm and chucking the bowl into a planter.

“But—”

“Come on,” he repeated. “No time for gentlemanly fisticuffs. You can’t be seen here.”

Half carrying her, he moved them to the exit. As soon as she remembered it was there, Sam yanked the gun from her waistband and dropped it to the floor. No guns. Ever. A guy in an NYPD uniform looked straight at them, and Samantha jerked her thumb in Veittsreig’s direction. With a nod, he moved off. Gorstein had kept his word, at least.

Rick shook out a handkerchief and pressed it gently to her cheek as they squeezed through the crowded exit doors. “Move aside,” he said in a fair Southern accent that only sounded British around the edges. “My wife’s been cut with glass.”

Trying to shake the worst of the cobwebs from her head, Samantha stood away from him a little. “You can’t be here, either,” she muttered.

He ran a finger over his moustache. “I’m not here. Nice, eh?”

“Who are you supposed to be, the seventies?”

Rick took hold of her arm again, and they headed with the rest of the museum refugees toward the street. The cacophony of sirens and bullhorns and police radios began to sink thuddingly into her throbbing skull. It looked like Armageddon on Fifth Avenue. With Rick still helping her to walk straight, they moved to the edge of the milling, half-panicked crowd. In the mass of people she felt a little more protected, but Rick didn’t stop. Instead he pulled out his cell phone and dialed.

“Let’s go,” he said without preamble, and hung up again.

A SWAT truck, sirens wailing, pulled up to the curb in front of them.
Jesus
. Wulf. Ignoring her shoving backward against him, Rick pushed her up the truck’s two steps. “Rick, no! You—”

“It’s okay, honey.”

She looked up at the truck’s driver. Looking back at her sat Stoney, his grin looking a little strained.

“Get in, baby. The meter’s running.”

“But—”

As Rick moved past her, the truck lurched into motion. While she watched, a hand against the ceiling to keep her balance, Rick opened one of the rear doors and kicked a large lump covered in canvas out onto the street.

“That was Wulf, wasn’t it?” she asked, as he pulled the door closed again.

“Was that his name? He never said.”

Samantha sat heavily on the floor of the truck as they sped down the street. “What the hell is going on? Am I unconscious? Or dead?”

“Neither.” Rick sat beside her. “Did you really think I would sit in a cab a block away and wait for you?”

“You agreed to.”

“Of course I did.” Leaning closer, he peeled the handkerchief away from her cheek. “That was too close, Samantha,” he said, his voice shaking. “I almost didn’t reach you in time.”

She fingered her cheek. It was shallow, more a burn than anything. Damn, it hurt. “Under the circumstances, I won’t complain.”

“Why the hell didn’t you just run for it when the robbery started?”

“I wanted to make sure they didn’t get away with it. I had to trigger the gallery fire doors one at a time. Nicholas got under the last one.”

“Walter, head for the nearest hospital,” Rick ordered.

“Already on the way.”

“No, no, no. Head toward the river, Stoney.”

“Are we still fleeing?”

“That’s where Veittsreig’s warehouse is. We were supposed to drop the goods there. The Hogarth and the Picasso might be there now.”

“After,” Rick said, carefully putting the handkerchief back in place.

“Ouch. If we wait until after, one of the crew might have given up the location to the cops.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“I want to make sure everything is there, and I want to make sure there aren’t any surveillance photos of me with Nicholas lying around.”

And she still wanted to know who the buyer was. If trouble was coming after her, she wanted to know who was sending it.

Wincing, Richard pulled off the moustache and muttonchops. Samantha hadn’t been too impressed by them, but he would guess that they’d served their purpose and no one had recognized him. “All right,” he said reluctantly. “The warehouse first.”

He wished he’d had more time to beat Veittsreig to a pulp; that Wulf character hadn’t been much of a challenge at all. Then again, as Walter had pointed out, he’d been fairly angry at the time, and might have hit harder than he strictly needed to.

His phone rang. Automatically he opened it up to answer it. “Addison.”

“Rick, it’s John Stillwell.”

“John. Might I call you back in an hour or so? I’m a bit—”

“Turn left, Stoney,” Samantha said. “Two blocks down on the right.”

“Rick, I have Matsuo Hoshido on the other line. He says if he can talk with you, he’ll make the deal tonight.”

“What about the city?”

“He says he has some kind of plan to deal with them.”

Samantha leaned forward. “Stoney, stop.”

“What is it, honey?”

Richard frowned. “I’ll call you back, John.”

“But—”

He flipped the phone closed and pocketed it again. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Samantha returned, standing and moving to the steps. “We’re in a big truck made up to look like it belongs to SWAT. I’d rather not drive up to the front of the warehouse in it, whether anybody there thinks it’s Nicholas coming back, or not.”

“Right.” With a somewhat chagrined look, Walter pulled onto a side street.

When they left the lorrie, Richard moved up beside Samantha. As he did so, he tucked a hand into his right pocket, fingering the Glock resting there. He’d never been closer to shooting someone than he had been in the lobby of the museum; the sight of Samantha backing away, off balance, from Veittsreig, a man who literally had a gun jammed into her mouth…If he’d thought he could have gotten a shot off before the bastard could react, he would have done it, FBI or not.

With a quick look around them, Samantha walked up to the touch pad beside the main warehouse door, flexed her fingers in their leather gloves, and keyed in some numbers. The red console button turned green. “Try and lift it,” she said, stepping back.

Richard had been half expecting her to pull the cover off the touch pad and rewire it. Shaking himself, he moved in and shoved the door up. Once all three of them were through, he closed it again.

“If somebody talked, the cops could be here any minute,” Samantha said, trotting over to a worktable covered in blueprints. “You guys look for the paintings. If they’re here, they’re probably boxed.”

“There are a lot of boxes in here,” Walter said, looking over at him. “Right, or left?”

“Left,” Richard decided, and headed for the far side of the warehouse.

“Rick.”

He faced Samantha, catching the old pair of work gloves she picked up and tossed at him. Right. Fingerprints. All he needed was something else to convince the insurance company that he
had
stolen the Hogarth himself.

Boxes lay stacked in haphazard piles across the length of the warehouse. He didn’t know the size of the Picasso, but the Hogarth was fairly large. That gave him a starting point, anyway. Neither Samantha nor Walter seemed to be taking much care as they tore through the contents of the warehouse, so Richard grabbed up a screwdriver and went to work.

“I’m only seeing car and truck parts, Sam,” Walter called, as he emerged from the middle of a stack and hurried to the next one. “They probably bought them as cover for the warehouse.”

“I would.” She’d given up on the table, and squatted to pull some cardboard boxes from underneath. “Dammit,” she swore, dumping a third box upside down. “I’m not seeing anything, either. If the stuff isn’t here, I’m not sure where it would be. They were living
here
. This is where everything should be.”

“Unless the paintings have been sold already,” Richard put in, moving to the row of cots against the wall and tilting each one over to see if anything had been attached beneath.
He wanted his painting back, but if any photographs of Samantha talking with Veittsreig existed, finding them took priority.

To one side of the cots he spied a door marked “Janitor.” Obviously no janitor had set foot in the warehouse for at least a decade. In front of the door, though, he could make out footprints and scrape marks in the thin layer of dust.

He pulled down on the door handle. Locked. “I may have something here,” he said. At the same moment his phone rang again. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, otherwise ignoring it.

“What?” Samantha asked, leaving the piles of thief refuse to approach him.

“The d—”

Walter gave a high-pitched whistle.

“Shit. Hide,” Samantha hissed, diving behind a box beside him, and dragging him down next to her.

The main warehouse door rattled and lifted. A minute later a silver Mercedes-Benz coasted inside and stopped.

“What the fuck?” Samantha breathed.

He glanced at her. Her eyes were narrowed, her expression set and grim. Obviously she knew whoever was in that car.

The car door opened, and a stocky man with dark hair going gray climbed out to pull down the metal warehouse door. Expensive suit, expensive car—and familiar-looking. “That’s Boyden Locke,” he whispered.

“That son of a bitch.” She scooted sideways, and Richard shifted to keep an eye on both her and Locke.

He’d been her client. One day after they’d arrived in New York he’d called and wanted Samantha to give him a review of his home security system. Then he’d invited the two of them to a party. And it had been his Picasso that went missing the next day. What the hell was he doing at the warehouse of the crew who’d most likely taken his painting?

“You think he hired Veittsreig, don’t you?” he murmured to Samantha.

She nodded, keeping her gaze on Locke as he crossed the warehouse, heading in their direction. “I do now. And I tried to set Patty up with him, dammit.” She paused. “Move back,” she breathed, shifting around the boxes to keep them between her and Locke.

Rick, a few feet farther away, could only duck lower. Obviously Locke had no idea that a cat burglar—or rather, a former cat burglar—was hidden three feet from him. If he had known, he would not have pulled out a key and unlocked the janitor’s closet.

He went in, and Samantha stood up, moving silently behind the door. For a moment Richard thought she meant to close Locke in, but she stayed where she was. A minute later Locke emerged, dragging a flat, rectangular crate with him.

“Boyden,” she said, and Locke started, turning around.

Samantha slugged him across the face.

Dancing backward as the crate fell over with a crash and an eruption of dirt and dust, Samantha watched Locke stagger a few steps back. He was a big guy, but she had backup. Besides, he’d played her. Practically everybody she’d met with in New York had tried to play her, it seemed like. That’s what she got for trying to go straight: people taking advantage of her.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Locke spat, running the back of his hand across his bloody lip.

Did he think she was still part of the robbery? Hm. She could damned well use that to her advantage. “I’m hiding,” she retorted. “That was some great plan. You set us up, didn’t you?”

“It
was
a great plan, and no, I didn’t set you up. Help me get these in the car.”

“For two and a half million, maybe. Otherwise, we’re going to have quite a disagreement.”

Behind Locke, she saw Rick slowly moving closer, edging sideways to put himself between Boyden and the Mercedes. And he didn’t look any happier than she felt. He didn’t move in, though; Rick definitely had good instincts, and she still thought he would have made a damn fine thief.

“The money was for the museum job. Help me with these and I won’t mention to the authorities that Addison suggested you might be willing to steal paintings from me for the insurance money.”

He had a point; both he and Rick were in the warehouse, and if it came down to it, who would the cops be more likely to believe? The rich guy, or the richer guy whose girlfriend was suspected of doing some shady things?
Fuck
. Then she noticed what Rick had in his hand. It wasn’t a gun, as she’d first thought; it was his phone. His camera phone. She stifled her sudden urge to smile.

“You had the museum theft planned before I came into town,” she continued, moving toward the edge of the crate. “How did you work in the Picasso and the Hogarth?”

“Serendipity,” he returned, wiping his mouth again. “I bid for the Hogarth over the phone, but Addison outbid me. That put plan B into motion. And then I thought, as long as he’s going to be robbed, I may as well be, too. The insurance payout for a stolen Picasso pays the fee of Nicholas and everybody in his crew. And inviting you to the party, well, that was just smart.”

“That was thinking on your feet,” she admitted. “But I still don’t haul paintings around for free.” She jerked her thumb in Rick’s direction. “For him, I might. But not for you.”

Locke turned around. “What—”

Rick gave him a smile. “Say cheese,” he said, and snapped a photo with the camera.

With a bellow, Locke launched at him. Rick tossed her the phone, sidestepping the charge and delivering a nice kidney punch at the same time. Apparently now was the time for gentlemanly fisticuffs. Rick knocked the staggering Locke sideways into a pile of boxes, and they both went down.