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
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 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 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.”