Page 77 of Conning the Billionaire
Kylie dropped to her knees behind the desk, hoping the heavy wood would stop the bullets.
25
QUESTIONS
MICAH
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.”
