Midnight Angels (41 page)

“S
TAY DOWN AND KEEP AWAY FROM THE DOOR,” RUMORE SHOUTED
to Kate and Marco, sliding two semiautomatics toward them across the cold floor. “And use these if anyone not wearing a badge or a uniform walks in here. Understood?”

“Where are you going?” Kate asked.

“I need to clear the air with some friends outside,” Rumore said, standing by the mausoleum doorway and checking the clip load on the two guns he held. He turned to look over at Kate and Marco, both taking cover under the side of a large coffin in the center of the room, plaster and marble debris flying all around them. “And remember, only come out if it’s me telling you to. Otherwise, stay in here and do your best not to get killed.”

“I’m still not clear why we’re here instead of the Vasari Corridor,” Marco said. “I mean shouldn’t we be more concerned with capturing the Raven?”

“I
wanted
to be here,” Kate said, “with the Angels.”

They huddled in the old English cemetery, in the Buonarroti chapel, their faces only inches from the resting place of the Midnight Angels, not knowing that in the center of the city, inside the halls of the Vasari Corridor, Professor Edwards lay dead. Marco stretched out his hand and grabbed the gun left for him by Rumore, his small cast not a hindrance. Kate already held her weapon in her hands. “I still don’t know how the detective knew the Angels would be in here,” he said to her, “and we couldn’t figure it out.”

“I told you, I was never any good with Richard’s clues,” Kate said. “I
also don’t have an entire unit of cops and a dozen local informants out there looking for the answer. Rumore does.”

“As it turned out, those informants don’t only work for the police,” Marco said. “They must have also spread the word to the Raven’s gang.”

Kate ducked under a heavy fuselage of bullets against stone and then lifted herself to her knees and peered at the door. “We have to help him,” she said. “There have to be at least six gunmen out there, maybe more. He can’t take them all on his own.”

“He told us not to move from here, remember?” Marco said.

“I heard him, Marco,” Kate said. “But he needs help, and right now we’re the only ones who can give it to him.”

Above them a series of bullets shattered glass, nicked against the thick wood door, and chipped the base of the tombs on the walls. Marco was down on hands and knees, the smoke in the room causing his eyes to water. “There’s only one way out,” he managed to say, “and they are bound to see us coming out the door. We’ll be easy targets.”

Kate ran from her side of the large coffin over toward a window close to the door, her sneakers hitting shattered glass. She crouched under the window and raised her head just enough to peer outside. “Not if they’re ducking our bullets,” she said. “They won’t be expecting return fire. If I were them, I would guess the cop is the only one with a weapon. If I start firing to cover you on your way out and then you get to a safe spot and cover me, they won’t know how many guns they’re up against. That might give Rumore enough time to pick off a few.”

“All I understood of that is that I’m going out the door first,” Marco said.

“Just run low and shoot straight,” she said. “They’re not expecting it and that might buy you the time you need to reach tree cover.”

Marco crawled over toward the door, the floor littered with dust, marble, and broken glass. He reached the wall, got to his knees and grabbed the handle. “Tell me when to go,” he said, “because if we wait for me to make the move, we’ll be here all night.”

Kate rested her gun against the windowsill and looked over at Marco. “Now!” she said and opened fire.

Marco swung the door open and headed into the darkness, bullets coming his way, firing back two of his own, crisscrossing toward a row of pine trees to his left. When he got close enough, he took a full dive into a
clump of leaves and wet grass and then rolled down a slight slope and lay there, the gun held in both hands, his heart beating hard against his chest. He turned on his stomach, made his way to a small boulder resting among the row of trees, and used that for cover. He tried to stand but his legs and upper body were shaking and he had trouble catching his breath. He closed his eyes and made a vain attempt to compose himself, knowing he had only a matter of seconds to do so before Kate came running out the mausoleum door.

“Fire two rounds into the tree cover.” It was Rumore’s voice, coming at him to his left, his body sheltered by darkness and foliage. “But wait until she comes out. I’ll move in closer and clear a path for her. Together it should be enough to get her to a safe spot.”

Marco opened his eyes, leaned his head out, and waited for Kate to emerge. As soon as he saw her race out, he cupped his hands around the gun and fired two bullets into the darkness. He then turned and saw Rumore walking straight out into the line of fire, his arms stretched out, a gun in each hand, firing off a volley of rounds, standing in the open ground, his body as much a shield for Kate as his weapons.

Kate ran off toward the right of the mausoleum, stopped to fire a round and then dove behind a row of bushes. She came up on her knees and fired off a second round, a loud grunt in the distance proof that the bullet had found its mark.

She zipped off bullets from the right, Marco let off the occasional shot from the left, Rumore working the middle, shooting rounds in every direction, pausing only to drop used clips and jam in fresh ones. The shooters moved among the shadows and the treeline, using the safety of the cemetery walls to reload and regroup. There were at least eight in motion, with only one of them down from a wound.

Rumore circled around one wall and held his position, his back resting against cold granite. He heard two men speaking in hushed tones to his right, tilted his head and saw them on the other side, both crouched down, guns pointed out toward the mausoleum. He jumped out between the walls, making just enough noise to be heard. The two men turned in his direction, caught the weight of his bullets and fell, one on top of the other. Rumore ran toward the men, grabbed their weapons, pulled ammo clips from their waistbands and then raced back into the fiery darkness.

He now stood in the center of the cemetery, firing in every direction
except where he knew Marco and Kate were laying in wait, looking to force the gunmen into the open. Two came at him from his left, firing as they ran. Rumore caught one with a bullet to the chest. The other nicked the detective’s leg, sending him down to one knee and forcing a gun loose from his hand. Rumore and the gunman exchanged heavy fire, now only a few feet apart, bullets ripping at their feet and above their heads before the kill shot found its mark and the gunman landed face-first onto the hard pavement, inches from the detective’s side.

Rumore never heard the shooter coming at him from behind. He had his head down, reloading one weapon and reaching for a second, his back a leather-jacket-clad bull’s-eye. The gunman lowered his weapon, crouched into a shooting position and prepared to fire.

The sound of two shots caused Rumore to turn and face the shooter. He caught the stunned and pained look on the man’s face seconds before he fell to the ground. To the left of the shooter he saw Marco, hot gun held in both hands.

Rumore stood and ran over to Marco. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” Marco said. “Are you?”

“I wouldn’t have been, if you hadn’t shown up,” Rumore said.

“What about your leg?” Marco asked, eyeing the blood coming out of the gaping wound just above Rumore’s right knee.

“I know how to limp,” he said. “There’s at least four more out there we need to find.”

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” Marco said, nudging his gun toward the fallen shooter.

“I know,” Rumore said. “But he meant to kill you.”

KATE WAITED FOR
the shooter to walk past. She was lying flat, the grass cold and wet on her back, her gun raised. She lifted her legs to brace herself and knocked aside several loose rocks. The noise caught the shooter’s attention and he whirled and fired down in her direction. Kate rolled away from the bullets, came up standing to his left and fired two bullets, both finding their mark. Down to her last shot, she moved toward the fallen man to retrieve his weapon.

The force of a man’s grip yanked her off the ground.

He had one hand around her throat and a sharp knife in his free hand
was lifted toward the sky. “I got you now,” he whispered, his rough skin brushing against her face, harsh breath causing her to flinch.

She jammed the heels of her sneakers into the soft ground and then slammed two heavy elbow blows into the pit of the man’s stomach. The force of the blows, combined with their unexpected arrival, sent the knife to the ground and the man down to his knees, clutching his stomach, gasping for air. Kate whirled and hit him across the face with two fast close-fisted blows, then grabbed the knife. The man looked up just as she crossed in front of him, the knife clutched in her right hand, the blade pointed at him, her hands as steady as her grip.

“I’ll take it from here,” Rumore said.

Kate didn’t look up when she heard the familiar voice, and she held her position. A bevy of police cars and ambulances, sirens wailing, were closing in on them, wheels shrieking just near the cemetery entrance.

“They’re all down, Kate,” Rumore said. “Except for one or two, who ran off when they heard the calvary rushing in.”

“What about Marco?” she asked, the adrenaline beginning to slow.

“He’s okay,” Rumore said. “He’s got my back, just in case I’m wrong about the other gunmen.”

She looked away from the man and glanced at Rumore, now standing next to her, his leg bleeding, a gun in his right hand pointed at the shooter. “Marco has
your
back?” she asked.

“Yes,” Rumore said with a nod. “Perfect man for the job, it turns out.”

CHAPTER
21

K
ATE CRADLED PROFESSOR EDWARDS IN HER ARMS, HER FACE
resting against the top of his head, Rumore and Marco standing by her side. The Vasari Corridor was now a twenty-first century crime scene—yellow tape placed around the areas of the shooting; CSU technicians taking swabs of blood from the walls and the floor, bagging bullet fragments and dusting for prints and evidence.

Kate gently rocked back and forth, let the tears flow down her cheeks as she fought back the urge to vomit. “I’m so sorry, Richard,” she whispered. “I should have been here for you. I did what I thought you would have wanted me to do—protect the Angels.”

Rumore leaned down next to her, one hand resting gently on her back. “They will need to keep his body in the morgue for a few days,” he said. “After that, you will be allowed to fly him home.”

Kate listened and nodded. “He’ll be buried next to my parents,” she said. “They would want him there with them. He was as much a son to them as I was a daughter, and as close to a father as I’ll ever know.”

“I’m sorry, Kate,” Rumore said. “My men had the entrances covered, but they must have entered through the passageway by the Pitti or perhaps some other entrance that we’re not even aware exists. Each one—MacNamera, the professor, the Raven—knew the secret ins and outs of this corridor. It made it difficult to keep track of them. Still, we should have prevented what happened.”

“Do you know where the Raven is?” Kate asked.

“We have an idea,” he said. “That gentleman you took down in the cemetery has helped confirm our suspicions.”

“Will you tell me?” she asked.

“This is no longer just your business, Kate,” Rumore said. “This is a police matter. It should have been all along. I allowed it to go too far, but now I won’t risk another death, especially yours.”

She turned to look up at him. “I’ll find him on my own if you don’t tell me,” she said. “This has been my fight all along and I’m the one who needs to finish it. The Raven is waiting for me, no one else.”

“The professor and his friend were two of the best the Society had,” Rumore said. “And the Raven took them down alone. He’s a professional and you’re not. I can take it from here and I will bring him down, that I promise you.”

Kate rested the professor’s head slowly and carefully on the top step, then stood and faced Rumore. “The Raven murdered my mother and father,” she said, barely able to get the words out. “And now he’s killed the man who raised me and loved me as if I were his own child. He needs to be put down, and I’m the one who needs to do it. If I can’t make you understand that now, at this moment, then you never will.”

Rumore stared at her, then glanced down at the body of Professor Edwards and nodded. “I’ll give you ten minutes,” he said. “If you can’t finish it by then, it will fall to me.”

“Where is he?” she asked.

A new voice echoed through the corridor. “The Salone dei Cinquecento,” Clare Johnson said, walking toward them, “in the Palazzo Vecchio.” She now stood three steps down from Rumore, Marco, and Kate, her eyes fixed on the body of Professor Edwards. “The police have the building cordoned off,” she said, “but he uses a network of underground passageways to get around.”

“What are you doing here?” Rumore asked.

“Officially,” she said, “I’m here to assess any damage done to the portraits and to the corridor itself. My company handles the insurance. Unofficially, I came to see if I could help. Richard was a good friend to me and an even better one to my father.”

“How do you know where the Raven is?” Kate asked.

“Because I’m supposed to meet him there in fifteen minutes,” she said.

“Why?” Rumore asked.

“The fact that you may have him surrounded, Detective, is of little importance
to the Raven,” Clare said. “He came to Florence to get the Midnight Angels, and he won’t leave until that goal is met, and he thinks I can be of help.”

“Is he right?” Rumore asked.

“I could be of help to him, if I wanted to be,” Clare said. “But then I would be on my way to see the Raven and not here talking to you.”