When he reached the top, Remi knelt beside him and fired once, twice, to keep the men below at bay. Sam set his rifle aside on the floor and pulled out his pistol. “Pete!”

Pete, lying flat on the fourth floor, reached down under the narrow staircase with a socket wrench and began to loosen bolts. As each one came loose, he let it fall, then moved to the next one. Sam reached down from the other side and began to unscrew bolts with his hand.

The sideboard below them on the second floor popped upward abruptly and slid aside. Men slipped out from under it and ran to both sides, where they couldn’t be seen from above. Just as one of them got his foot on the lowest step to the fourth floor, Pete turned the final bolt and the staircase fell with a horrific crash. The third floor belonged to the enemy.

Chapter 34

THE FOURTH FLOOR

SAM GRASPED PETE’S ANKLES AND TUGGED HIM BACK from the edge of the opening just as the men below began firing wildly upward through the rectangular hole in the floor that once had held the staircase.

The opening was much narrower than the stairwells on the lower floors because the stairs were narrower up to Sam and Remi’s floor. Sam said, “They’ll be bringing the aluminum ladders up next. What have we got that will seal that opening?”

Remi said, “How about the safes?”

“Brilliant,” said Sam. “Pete? You okay?”

“I’m still alive.”

“Then help me with the safes. They’re bolted into the wall from the inside. Everybody else, stay back from the opening, but don’t take your eyes off it. Fire a shot now and then to remind them we’re still here.”

Sam went to the wall, pressed the spot to reveal the hidden corridor, stepped in, and opened the safes. He and Pete unbolted the two now-empty gun safes and Sam opened the third one, which held papers. Pete removed the bolts from this last one and then he and Sam pushed all three, one at a time, across the hardwood floor to the edge of the stairwell. As they pushed the last and biggest one, a deep scratch appeared on the floor. Sam said to Remi, “Oops. Sorry.”

“It’s too late to make Architectural Digest, Sam,” she said. “The whole place is decorated in vintage Kalashnikov.” They pushed the safes over, one by one, across the stairwell. They had sealed the opening completely.

Wendy said, “What do we do now?”

Sam said, “We seem to have just about run out of floors to make them fight for. For the moment, you sit on this safe. They don’t have anything with them that can make a dent in it, but the second it moves I want to hear you yell your head off and fire down into any space that appears.”

“Okay,” she said.