The younger man who’d found her burst through the door, a look of panic in his eyes. “Boss?”

Now she heard gunfire as well-short handclaps and staccato pops through the window that sounded nothing like she thought they should.

Philippe was frozen, picturing his guests on the first floor panicking at the sound of small weapons fire and fleeing for their cars.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

“Hang on, guys,” Larson told the two children, the first bursts of light bouncing off the low clouds up by the manor house. It reminded him of the Fourth of July, of festive holidays and drinking too much. Weak and faint from the loss of blood, his every wound stinging unmercifully from the salt of his sweat, Larson looked and felt far worse off than he was. Most of the cuts were shallow, none life-threatening, and yet he felt himself fading fast.

Penny rode bareback in front, gripping the mane. The boy-Adam, he’d finally told Larson his name-held fast around Penny’s waist, a stranger to horses. Larson led the quarter horse by the halter, first at a walk, then a trot, following a westbound trail. He’d discovered a laminated map of the compound’s trail system posted outside the tack room and followed it now in his head. There were three major forks he would face-two rights and a left-in order to reach the estate’s western boundary. It was there he was to rendezvous with SPD, although he wasn’t ruling out seeing Rotem himself. Hamp and Stubby would be sights for sore eyes. But being with Hope and Penny together was all that mattered now.

With the detonation of the ordnance, he believed Hope’s chances greatly diminished. With the compound now under attack, any extra baggage would be dealt with quickly. He might have believed her already dead had it not been for the second message from the BlackBerry:

MM, 3rd Fl.

Meriden Manor, Third Floor. It had arrived just before the first explosions. It at least gave him faint hope that she’d escaped or had bought herself time.

“Firefly!” he heard from behind him.

Two black-clad SWAT operatives converged on Larson from behind. One took the horse’s reins from him. The other, wielding a semiautomatic rifle, continued sweeping the surroundings, forward and back in constant motion.

“As far away as possible,” Larson instructed, “as quickly as you can.”

“Copy that.”

He reached up and touched Penny’s small hand. “You’re doing great,” he said.

“But where’s Mommy?” she said. The two kids had held up amazingly well, Penny a leader throughout.

“I’m gonna go get her,” Larson said.

The SWAT guy took off at a jog, leading the horse. The kids hung on.

Larson turned back down the trail, and started to run.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

LaMoia waited at the estate’s back gate, waited for the driver of the Navigator to climb out and unlock it. He waited for the exact moment the man inserted the key into the padlock and twisted. Waited for the lock to pop open and the man to remove it and the chain from the gate.

Then he stepped out of shadow and calmly announced, “Police.”

The driver jerked from the surprise and reached for a weapon. From just over three feet away, LaMoia squeezed the trigger and blew the man’s kneecap away. As the driver spun around, screamed, and fell to the ground, LaMoia saw someone inside lunge from the backseat up into the driver’s seat. He could have fired on the man, but until a gun came out either window, he had a better option.

Instead, he counted silently in his head-singing, actually-to exercise the proper patience. Right when the man slipped in behind the wheel, LaMoia fired repeated rounds directly at the car’s front bumper. One, two, three, four… With the fifth round, he hit the G spot and the front airbags deployed, inflating and snapping the driver’s head and body back into the seat like a sixteen-ounce glove on the fist of Muhammad Ali.

He strode forward then, the gun trained right into the face of the would-be driver, ready to send the first person who twitched to his Maker.

He tore the driver’s door open, not seeing the woman in the far back until the interior lights came on. That one needed medical attention. He might drive her himself-the Navigator was a nice ride.

He recognized the man behind the wheel as Ricardo Romero. He’d been doing his homework.

“Sorry,” LaMoia said. “Road closed.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

Larson had no craving to run headlong into a firefight, but he accepted it as a necessary evil as he chugged uphill with a pronounced limp.

He reached a gridlock of confusion as a stable of black vehicles battled for position. One car backed up onto the grass and shot off in twin rooster tails of mud. Another followed. Both came within a matter of feet of Larson, nearly running him over, yet no one bothered with him. Perhaps no one saw him. Perhaps he wasn’t there. Maybe he’d died beneath the double-wide and was now living out a final fantasy that was nowhere but in his head.

Rotem had orchestrated quite the show. To look at it, to hear it, one would think a hundred agents had stormed the compound, when Larson knew it had to be many, many fewer. Lacking any organized defense, shots were returned sporadically, with many of the estate’s guards already apparently AWOL.

Amid this hellfire, Larson made directly for the mansion’s front door. Once inside, he left behind what looked, smelled, and sounded like a small war and entered a world of opulence and grandeur. In their seclusion within this estate, the Romeros and others had spared little expense.

He glimpsed himself in the entranceway’s oversize, gilded mirror, wondering at the walking horror there, and turning away from it. He didn’t recognize himself. His sleeves and pant legs shredded, blood darkening even the black windbreaker he wore, Larson entered the grand staircase and climbed, his legs dragging, barely willing to cooperate, unmoved by the desperation that drove him.

He marched toward the third floor, another man’s gun in hand.

The lack of electricity was no doubt Rotem’s doing. Close to the manor house now, several percussive stun grenades exploded, rattling windows and shaking the foundation. Designed to throw shock waves meant to rupture sinuses and puncture eardrums inside enclosed spaces, the use of the grenades outside, where they were less effective but impressive as pyrotechnics, smacked of Hampton and Stubblefield and his squad’s methods of overwhelming a fugitive prior to a final strike.

The harsh white light from those flares burned through windows and lit the upstairs hallways. He climbed beneath the ostentation of a dozen portraits of jowly old men looking proudly officious with their golf clubs.

In the distance now, the first whine of approaching sirens. Backup. A stupid tactic, given Hope’s captivity. The sirens would panic Hope’s captors and shorten her life considerably. If she wasn’t dead already.