there was a large foyer with a marble floor with a round escutcheon mosaic at the center. As they stepped onto its surface, three men seemed to materialize from a shadowy doorway somewhere beside the stairs.
One man pulled back the charging lever on his Skorpion machine pistol, but the man beside him grasped his shoulder and said something in Russian that made him lower the weapon. Sam said to Remi, “They need us alive, to turn over the treasure.”
“Do you promise?”
The three rushed toward Sam and Remi, who separated and dodged them. Sam faked to the side and redirected the first man’s momentum into the staircase railing, then gave the second a glancing punch along the side of the head as he went by.
Remi backed up to the large fireplace that dominated the foyer. As the third man came toward her, she snatched up the poker. He took a tentative step toward her, but she didn’t budge. “You just came after me because I’m the only girl.”
He smiled.
“Bad choice.” Remi performed a fencing thrust with the fireplace poker, which extended it at least a foot farther than the man had anticipated and poked him hard in the stomach. As he bent over to grasp his stomach, Remi swung the poker overhand and hit him on the head. He straightened and charged for her, knowing that in close quarters he could overpower her. She swung as she stepped to the side, bashed the back of his head as he went by, and put him out, unmoving, on the floor.
She saw the other two had recovered and were beginning to rush Sam and so she thrust the poker between the ankles of the nearest man. As he tripped, she withdrew the poker and brought it across his head as he fell. The third man, the one who had the Skorpion machine pistol on a sling, started to raise it toward her, and Sam delivered a kick to the side of his knee. The sudden pain brought the man down, and Sam was on him to wrest the gun away.
The gun went off, firing an unaimed burst into the floor, the far wall, and the staircase. Then it was empty, and Sam delivered a punch to the face that bounced the man’s head off the floor. He took the gun and pulled the spare magazine out of the leather case attached to the sling, ejected the spent one and inserted the spare.
Remi was already halfway across the foyer to the dining room. They both could hear the thunderous sound of many booted feet coming down the stairs from the second and third floors.
Sam caught up with her, and they dashed through the huge formal dining room, with its thirty-foot table, and then ran into the kitchen. Sam whispered, “Do you know where we’re going?”
“We need to get out, but we can’t go outside yet or they’ll get a clear shot at us.”
“We’ll have to try to make a splash from here.” Sam bolted the door to the dining room, ran to the other side of the kitchen and bolted the door to the back stairway, then locked the door that led outside. They could hear running feet outside as men got into position.
Sam went to the big restaurant-sized gas stove and turned on the burners. There was no sound except the electric starters clicking repeatedly as they produced a spark. “They turned off the gas,” he said. “Electricity’s still on because they expect to catch us in the lights.”
Sam flung open the pantry door, turned on the light, and looked inside. There was a barrel about five feet deep and three feet in diameter. He took off the top. “Flour,” he said. He tilted it and rolled it to the middle of the floor.
“What are you doing?” asked Remi.
“I need two ounces of flour per cubic yard of air,” he said. “Help me.” He pushed over the flour barrel, lifted flour with both arms, and tossed it into the air. Remi did the same. He ran to the far side of the kitchen, where there was a big fan on a five-foot stand. He turned it on and aimed it at the big pile of spilled flour. In a couple of seconds, it was blowing it into the air, filling it with the fine white powder, turning the air in the kitchen into a cloud. “Get in the pantry,” he said, then picked two pie pans off the counter, knelt on the floor, and tossed panfuls of flour into the air as fast as he could.
He looked around him, seemed to judge that things were going the way he wanted, and ran to the pantry to join Remi. He shut the door, flopped down beside her with the light still on, pushed some dish towels under the door, and put his arm over her. She said, “A flour bomb, Sam?”
“Almost anything explodes if you treat it right,” he said. “Once there’s enough flour in the air, the electric stove starters should ignite it. Close your eyes, cover your ears, and open your mouth. Do not raise your head.”
They lay still. Then there was a terrible moment when the light in the pantry went dark. There was no longer a sound of fans or the clicking of the electric starters on the stove. “Well, that’s that,” he said.
“That’s what?”
“They turned off the main circuit breaker. No igniter.”
In a single avalanche of sound, the doors on both sides of the kitchen banged, assaulted by men using heavy objects as battering rams. They heard many footsteps outside, men dashing toward the back of the house. Sam used the charging lever to load the first round into the chamber of the Skorpion he had taken from the guard. He reached up to turn the knob of the pantry door and opened it a crack. The fans had stopped and the white flour was suspended in the perfectly still air, so thick it was difficult to see across the room, difficult to breathe. In an instant, Sam foresaw what was about to happen. He yanked the door shut, held Remi down and kept his body over hers. “Stay down.”
A kitchen window shattered onto the floor, and a machine pistol began to spray bullets and sparks of burning powder into the room—
The flour suspended in the air exploded in a huge, fiery blast. It blew the kitchen doors outward, one into the dining room and the other into the back stairway, tearing the wood from its hinges and knocking the six or seven men senseless who had been trying to batter the doors in. The men at the rear of the kitchen fared worse because in the instant that the explosion blew the glass out of the windows, much of the wall blew out too, and was burning. The parts of the kitchen that still stood were burning too.
Sam pushed off the floor, lifting the pantry door off his back. Remi struggled to sit up. They were both white as ghosts, every inch of them covered with flour. He looked out at the damage. “Can you run?”
“Like a scared rabbit.”
They dashed from the pantry, ran for the hole that had been the back wall, and then they were out into the night. The fire was already growing inside the mansion, and as they ran they could hear battery-operated smoke alarms going off all over it in a growing chorus. They sprinted across the garden behind it, running for the darkness.
Remi grabbed Sam’s hand. “The stable is over there,” she said as she veered toward a long, low building. Sam ran harder.
Behind them there were injured men being dragged out of the smoke-filled building into the air, many of them coughing and many battered and cut by flying doors and windows.
Remi and Sam slipped into the stable, where they could see a row of ten stalls with horses in them. The big noise had startled the animals, so they tossed their heads and looked at the two intruders with big rolling, frightened eyes. Far down the row, there was a horse kicking the gate of his stall, making a sound like gunshots.
Remi walked along the stalls, talking to the horses. “Hello, boy. What a big, smart boy you are. And handsome too.” She reached up and patted each horse, murmuring sweet words to all of them. In a short time they seemed to be calmer, but outside the disturbing human noises continued—shouts, running feet, smoke alarms.
Sam held the Skorpion in his hand as he watched through the partially open door. “They’re not turning on the power.”
“Would you?”
“Probably not. The dark should help us get out the back of this building and into the fields.”
“What would help more is if you’ll saddle your own horse.”
“Horse?”
“We can’t outrun them, we don’t have a car, and can’t get to one without getting shot. A horse can run across country where there are no roads. Sasha says the railroad tracks are that way and they lead to a station.” She swung an English saddle over the horse and cinched the strap. “Be good, big guy. Be calm.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Sam.
