Chapter 12 - Diana Turns on Her Master
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"Fine!" Julian shouted down the stairs, sweat stinging his eyes as the distant wail of NYPD ESU sirens echoed up from Park Avenue eighty floors below. "Walk up here alone and put your thumb on the hatch pad yourself, Marcus! The second the door opens and our chopper lifts off from the pad, we leave her behind on the roof!"
"Hold your position, Cole," I told my security chief calmly without looking back.
With my hands open at my sides, I climbed the glass treads of the spiral staircase step by step until I stood on the upper landing right beside the biometric wall panel for the rooftop helipad door—less than four feet from where Julian and Kael held Diana pinned against the railing.
Up close, the smell of Julian’s Latakia pipe tobacco mixed with the sour stench of his fear and Diana’s expensive French perfume.
"Open it," Kael ordered, shifting the muzzle of the stolen Glock from Diana’s throat to aim directly between my eyes while his two sleeper guards below covered the bottom of the stairs.
I raised my right hand toward the biometric glass pad on the wall.
Except I didn't press my thumb onto the green unlocking square.
While climbing the stairs, I had watched Diana’s eyes. Behind her terror, the narcissistic fury of a woman who had just realized Julian intended to throw her away like garbage was boiling over. And on her right foot, beneath the hem of her silver couture gown, she was wearing four-inch stiletto heels with solid steel-reinforced tips.
As my hand touched the wall panel, I didn't hit the door lock—I slapped the manual CO2 fire-suppression purge valve mounted directly beside the rooftop electrical conduit.
Instantly, blinding white pressurized halon mist and a deafening 120-decibel fire horn erupted directly from the ceiling nozzle six inches above Viktor Kael’s head.
At the exact same second, Diana didn't wait to be rescued—she drove the four-inch steel heel of her stiletto straight down with all her weight through the instep of Julian Vance’s dress shoe while biting violently into Viktor Kael’s wrist.
"Let go of me, you bastard!" Diana screamed.
Kael cursed as the blinding white gas hit his eyes, his gun barrel jerking upward for half a second.
That half-second was all I needed.
I pivoted off the wall, caught Kael’s gun wrist in a two-handed vise before he could recover his sightline, and drove the point of my elbow straight across the bridge of his nose while twisting the Glock outward against his thumb joint. The pistol discharged harmlessly into the reinforced skylight glass overhead before clattering down the spiral stairs.
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Down at the bottom of the stairs, Cole and his three operatives fired four synchronized non-lethal taser and beanbag rounds through the smoke, dropping the two sleeper guards onto the marble gallery floor before they could raise their carbines.
Up on the landing, Julian Vance lunged past a screaming Diana to grab a decorative bronze sculpture off the pedestal to strike me from behind—only for me to spin inside his swing and drive a right cross straight into his jaw, sending my fifty-eight-year-old Chief Operating Officer crashing backward down the first flight of glass stairs into Cole’s waiting handcuffs.
