“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” sang the Gingerbreadman as he walked across the atrium. Jack looked around desperately for a possible escape route. The room was full of desks with Quang-6000 computers hooked up to virtual reality headsets, gloves and boots. There were no windows, so Jack headed as fast as he could to an emergency exit at the far end of the room. He pushed the bar to open it, but it was locked. He threw his full weight against the door but it wouldn’t budge, so he picked up the heaviest object he could find—a computer—and hurled it at the recalcitrant door, with all his strength. It did nothing except scratch the surface. He might as well have tried to throw a tomato through a piano.

He had just raised his revolver to try to blow out the lock like he’d seen in the movies when the other door was kicked off its hinges by a well-placed gingerbread foot and the Ginja assassin strode into the room. Before Jack could even react, the Gingerbreadman had loosed off a single shot that destroyed the exit sign above Jack’s head. He turned to look at the figure framed in the doorway, who was still smiling.

“Not like you to miss.”

“I didn’t miss,” the Gingerbreadman said, tossing the shotgun aside and removing the belt of cartridges from his waist. “It’s just that I do so enjoy a certain ‘hands-on’ feel to my work. Using a gun does so distance one from one’s victims. Why, you cannot hope to smell the fear from farther than a couple of feet away. What enjoyment snipers get from their sport, I have no idea.”

Jack stared, his mind racing but his fear under control. The abomination at the door had killed—as far as Jack knew—112 times. One more was nothing to him. The Ginja rubbed his powerful, spongy hands together.

“What shall I pull off first, Jack? An arm? A leg? I could twist your head a full three hundred and sixty degrees…. Okay, fun’s over. I’d expected a better fight than this, but perhaps you aren’t the man I thought you were.”

Jack fired the revolver again, but the slug flew through the cakey body, this time hardly making a mark.

“Two left, Jack.”

He fired again and blew an icing button off the Ginja’s chest.

“That leaves one. I’ll think I’ll do your legs first, but from the knee down—a leg torn from the hip always results in rapid death through bleeding, and I want this to last. Unless you have any objections, of course?”

He smiled again, the murderous subroutines in his gingery body running through to their inevitable end. He was built for one purpose and existed for only one reason. Regardless of the ideological wasteland that governed his psychotic thought processes, he was a creature at peace with himself. His life, such as it was, had meaning.

Jack, despite having a 280-pound monstrosity lumbering toward him, was oddly calm. He found himself thinking about Madeleine and the kids. He wouldn’t see them graduate, or even grow up. And then there was the wedding.

“Pandora.”

“Sorry?” said the Gingerbreadman, who was wondering whether to postpone the leg tearing in favor of something unbelievably unpleasant he’d seen happen to Mel Gibson at the end of Braveheart.

“My daughter. I’ll miss her wedding. It’s in a month.”

“Well,” said the Gingerbreadman reflectively, “I could just let you go—as long as you promise to come back straight afterward. No, just kidding. You’ll have to miss her wedding—and the birth of your first grandchild. You’ll miss your own memorial, too—but only by a couple of days.”

Jack wasn’t listening. He was thinking. There had to be a very good reason that Project Ginja Assassin had been canceled. He was such a perfect warrior. Intelligent, resourceful, amoral and indestructible. Cake or cookie? Did it matter? Jack had a sudden thought. Yes, it probably did matter. A cake went hard when it went stale, and a cookie went soft. It was a long shot but he had nothing to lose. He aimed his gun at the Gingerbreadman. He had one bullet remaining.

“You’re a cookie.”

“So?” asked the Gingerbreadman, intrigued by Jack’s sudden confidence. “What are you up to, Spratt?”

“This.”

He aimed the gun, not at the Gingerbreadman but at the fire-control system on the ceiling above them. The well-placed shot blew off the sprinkler head, and a stream of water descended onto them both. The Gingerbreadman frowned and looked at the water pouring off himself, tiny particles of gingerbread already being washed off and falling to the floor at his feet. Cookies soften because… they absorb water. He made for the door. The other sprinklers in the room, sensing the drop in pressure, fired simultaneously, spraying the room with even more water. The Gingerbreadman tripped over a table in his haste to escape, and another jet of water caught him on the legs. They softened and buckled under him. He got to his feet and reached the door just as the sprinklers fired in the atrium; there was no escape from the deluge.

“Quick thinking, Spratt!” he shouted, turning back as the water continued to gush down upon both of them, larger pieces of gingerbread now falling from his body as the moisture started to soften up his cookieish tissues. He studied one of his hands with interest as a chunk of gingerbread dropped off.

“They designed me as the perfect warrior,” he announced with a wry smile, “only with one fatal flaw—I can’t get wet. I’m dying, Jack.”

“I’m counting on it.”

“Now, that’s not nice,” replied the Gingerbreadman reproachfully as an icing button dropped to the floor with a damp plop. He looked around and tried to pick up the shotgun, but his hands collapsed into mush around the weapon.

“Rats,” he muttered. “Well, no matter.”

He walked slowly toward Jack, who scrambled backward and threw his gun at the brown figure.

“Congratulations,” said the Gingerbreadman slowly, as larger pieces of gingerbread started to slough off his body in the never-ending stream of water. “I underestimated you.”

“I get that a lot.”

“Really? D’you know, in a way I’m almost glad it was you. I’d have liked to have been your friend. Perhaps that’s why I could never kill you—until now.”

The Gingerbreadman lunged at Jack, slipped on the wet floor and collapsed into a puddle of water. Jack ran quickly around to the other side of the room as the Ginja tried to get up and fell over again as his foot came off. But he wasn’t giving up, trying desperately to crawl in Jack’s direction using arms that disintegrated into pulp as he grappled with the slippery floor. He stared at Jack, his crumpled features registering annoyance that he’d failed rather than any sort of fear over his demise. An arm gave way, and he collapsed facedown into the pool of water. When he lifted himself again, he was without a face. His cherry eyes, red icing nose and licorice mouth had fallen into the large brown mass of sodden gingerbread that had gathered beneath him. He flailed around wildly as Jack looked on, the water running off Jack’s hair and down his neck causing him nothing worse than mild discomfort. The Gingerbreadman, now blind and mute and without any limbs, thrashed uselessly about in the center of the room.

Within minutes it was all over. The most notorious and violent multiple murderer the nation had seen was nothing more than a soggy lump on the floor. Jack walked over and cautiously kicked one of the grapefruit-size glacé cherry eyes that only ten minutes before had flashed such evil confidence. Abruptly, the downpour stopped. The water ran off the tables, mixing and swirling around the brown stain in the middle of the floor. Jack paused for a moment to collect his thoughts, then splashed through the puddle and out the door and made his way back to the tank in the center of the atrium. Mary was still very much in danger, and if he could rescue her and secure McGuffin and the Alpha-Pickle, all might still be well. His phone rang, and he dug it out of his pocket. It was Briggs.