Sitting smugly on black velvet, much as it had back at the Hollywood Heritage Museum, was the Heart of the Ocean.
The air seemed somehow thinner now, and her breathing came in short, rapid gasps. Questions tumbled through her mind, like dominoes knocking into each other...
How had it gotten here?
Had Sterling been Moody’s buyer?
Or had some fence bought it from Moody and sold it to Sterling?
Sufficient time had passed, since the original theft, for either of those transactions to have taken place; and yet somehow Max couldn’t understand how the necklace had gotten from Moody’s pocket to this room, in this house. Something seemed... wrong.
Very wrong.
Her face felt hot, her stomach icy, and goose bumps of fear ran up her arms, something that had not happened since... and she flashed on herself, in the woods, the night of the escape, fleeing Manticore, fleeing Lydecker...
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” a warm voice asked from behind her.
And yet there was something cold about it.
In fact, the voice froze her, the zippered bag with the Grant Wood inside still dangling from her right hand, like an absurdly oversized purse.
It wasn’t a voice belonging to any hired help: this was Jared Sterling’s voice; she hadn’t turned around yet, but she recognized it, from video clips she’d played on Kendra’s computer.
Still looking at the lovely blue stone, she said, “Someone told me once... diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
“Wrong movie... You want to put the painting down?”
Max shook her head slowly. “Not really. I worked pretty hard to get it.”
“As did I.”
A door opened, and another voice blurted: “Sir!”
“Ah — Morales. Take over, would you? I’m just having a glass of warm milk... my ulcer again.”
Behind her, she heard a pistol cock.
“Try not to kill her, Morales,” the warm voice said. “She has a very nice ass.”
Then another door opened, and footsteps echoed away.
The new voice spoke again, and it was touched with a south-of-the-border lilt: “Turn around, you... slowly.”
She did as she’d been told — a good girl — and Morales stood in front of her now, his pistol aimed at the middle of her chest.
“Nice and easy now,” he said. “I want you to set that bag on the floor, like it’s your poor sweet gran’ma.”
Again she did as told — even though she had no “sweet gran’ma” that she knew of.
Morales’s other hand went up to his mouth and he spoke into his sleeve. “Intruder contained in the gallery, repeat, the gallery.”
Rising slowly, she heard a crackily “ten-four” from Morales’s earpiece.
Then the security man crossed slowly toward her and, though his face remained impassive and professional, something sexual flickered in his eyes when he said, “I’m going to have to pat you down.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Put your hands behind your head, little girl; wing those elbows.”
Morales crouched, keeping his handgun and his eyes on his captive even as his free hand reached for the zippered bag. He had begun to rise, slowly, when footsteps in the foyer drew his eyes toward the door, just long enough to give Max the opening she needed.
She swung at the waist, twisting her body as if exercising, and one of those elbows he’d requested caught Morales on the side of the head.
Pitching sideways from the blow, he got off one wild shot that buried itself in the wall, between two of those valuable pictures. She thrust her right foot into his throat, and — already off-balance — he tumbled backward, gasping for breath. Before he hit the floor, Max had kicked the gun from his fingers and it went spinning across the waxed wood floor, clattering against the floorboards clear across the room.
Morales gurgled and seemed vaguely conscious, but showed no sign of getting up.
Behind her, in that doorway Sterling had slipped out, a deep voice growled, “Freeze!”
Instead, Max did two cartwheels, and was into her back flip when the tall crew-cut leader’s pistol coughed harshly, twice, both rounds missing the blur that was Max and burying themselves in a wall and a painting, respectively.
The catlike home invader landed in front of him, perhaps a yard separating them, enough room for her to kick the pistol from his hand. Then she pirouetted, back-kicked the estate’s top security man in the belly, folding him up, and sent him flying across the room, where he smacked into a wall hard enough to make several pictures hang crooked.
He still had that gun, so she went to him, incredibly fast, and when he tried to rise, and looked at where she’d been, the intruder was gone... and he then glanced to his right, where she was now standing.
“Can’t play with you,” she said. “Sorry...”
Her left foot caught him in the groin and he cried out shrilly and sagged to the floor again. Max was taking no chances, however, and as soon as her left foot touched the floor, her right foot came up and caught the leader under the chin, knocking him unconscious and sending him sliding across the waxed surface, like a kid on a sled.
She sprinted back to where Morales lay bubbling — he was unconscious now — and snatched up the waterproof bag. Then she smashed the Plexiglas case with a kick, and — for the second time! — grabbed the precious Heart of the Ocean, triggering an alarm: a buzzerlike bawling.
Max slipped the necklace into a vest pocket, which she zipped shut, and carried the bag with the painting in her left hand as she moved toward the door that would take her back to the foyer — she had come in the front way, she’d go out the same.
She was heading for the security keypad when she all but bumped into the black guy, Maurer, finally down from upstairs, looking a little disheveled, and sweaty, from an apparently thorough and fruitless search of the vast upper floors. The MP7A was in his hands, and he swung it up, leveling the weapon at her...
... but Max leapt high and with a martial-arts kick sent the weapon flying; when the MP7A landed on the marble floor, hitting hard, it fired off its own burst and shattered a priceless Frank Lloyd Wright chair into kindling.
Maurer was no pushover, however, and he came roaring at her with his fists raised.
“Wanna box?” she asked.
A straight right broke his nose and another landed squarely on his jaw with a satisfying crunch. Maurer fell backward, stiff-legged, and did a backward pratfall, his head smacking on the marble. The only question Max had was whether he was out from her punch, or from losing that battle with the floor...
She didn’t bother to Gameboy the keypad; it wasn’t like they didn’t know she was there. She threw open the front door, triggering the alarm — this one an annoying honking, which made an off-key counterpoint to the gallery buzzer (different sounds apparently indicated different security breach points — Max admired the strategy).
Bad move, she thought, realizing she should have taken the time to punch in the keycode; mentally, she pictured Moody frowning and shaking his head at her.
Those dueling alarms would, with honking and screeching, draw the attention not only of the rest of the security team, but cops and neighbors and anybody for at least a square mile who wasn’t stone-cold deaf.
Halfway across the yard, slipping back into the fog, she suddenly saw Jackson emerging from the swirling mist, crossing toward her, his MP7A raised.
Not waiting for him to act, Max launched herself to one side, diving, rolling, disappearing into the smokelike fog.
The guard knew enough not to fire into the fog — he might shoot one of his own team — and when he pursued her, assuming she was on the move, almost ran into her.