She spotted things she could use in the cockpit of the boat the rigger had been working on. She turned around and stepped closer to the car. She crouched in a swift, sure motion, slipped the folded rectangle of ammonium nitrate–impregnated newspaper under the car, thumbed the lighter, touched the flame to the newspaper, and rose as quickly.

She got ten feet away before the smoke bomb ignited.

The Audi suddenly disappeared in a whirlwind of thick white smoke. Kincaid jumped down into the sailboat’s cockpit and scrambled back to the pier carrying a Halotron fire extinguisher and a six-foot-long boat hook.

The rigger was a big man. It took him a moment to untangle himself from the backseat. He threw open the back door on the passenger side and stumbled out coughing in the acrid smoke.

Kincaid dropped the boat hook.

She shouted, “Fire! Fire!”—staging a quick-thinking-passerby performance for the benefit of potential witnesses—and aimed the extinguisher at his face. He had removed his sunglasses and even as she blasted him with the pressurized heat-absorbing liquid she recognized him as the commando who had conducted the brilliant rearguard action that enabled President for Life Iboga to escape from Isle de Foree.

He was just as cool here, a highly trained, lightning-fast operator who, despite being half-blinded by the smoke bomb and the sweet-ether-smelling stream of Halotron stinging his eyes, whipped a Tavor Micro TAR-21 assault rifle from his tool pouch and thumbed the fire selector level to fully automatic mode.

Kincaid knew instantly what he was going to do. Taken by surprise, unable to see who was attacking him and how many they were, he would spin in a circle and pull the trigger, spew the entire 30-round shot magazine in a rapid burst of deadly fire, slam a fresh magazine from his bag into the weapon, and gun down anyone still standing, whether attacker or innocent bystander.

Kincaid dropped the fire extinguisher and scooped the boat hook off the concrete. The hook end consisted of two blunt studs for pushing off, which were rounded to minimize the risk of tearing sailcloth; the hook for snaring lines was similarly rounded and curved back toward the handle. The pole was made of aluminum sheathed with vinyl. It was too light to stagger as big a man as she was facing or even knock the gun out of his hands.

Kincaid hurled it like a javelin.

She aimed for his eyes.

He was amazingly fast, with the reflexes of a cobra and the fighting instincts of a Spanish bull. He raised a big hand to block the boat hook, brushing it slightly off-course, and turned away. The hook missed his eye but bashed his temple. The stunning blow would have dropped most men. It hardly slowed him. But Kincaid had achieved her first goal of keeping his finger off the trigger.

He lunged at her.

He outweighed her by a hundred pounds. He spread his long arms to bear-hug her between his empty hand and the gun. He was thinking he could smother her with his weight, a common football-clod mistake. Kincaid backpedaled and drew from the sheath hidden under her compact shoulder bag a carbon-fiber scalpel.

She slid the razor-edged blade inside the crook of his elbow. She ripped it the length of his forearm. He kept coming and Kincaid kept slicing, down his wrist and through the heel of his hand. As his hand opened convulsively, releasing the gun, she continued cutting, crossing his palm, opening the flesh from his elbow to his fingers.

The Micro TAR-21 fell to the pavement. It was made of plastic and bounced. Kincaid caught it on the hop. Backing away before he could grab her, bobbling the weapon around to point the business end his way, she tucked it close to her body, rotated the selector lever to semiautomatic, and demanded, “Who the hell are you?”

He raised his bloody arm. His face had gone chalk white with shock, but it was contorted with rage. He pointed a red-dripping finger at her face. “You are dead meat.”

“ Me?I’m not bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m holding the gun.” She aimed it at his knee. “Who are you?”

“Fuck you,” he retorted. If the shock and awe she had already blitzed him with would not make him answer her, the fear of her shooting him in the leg wouldn’t, either. Kincaid went at his ego instead, tearing into it with the same ferocity with which she had slashed his arm.

“Fuck me? Fuck you. Where’d you learn to fight? Kindergarten? Nobody taught you to lead with bone? You shoulda blocked me with your radius. You made me a present of your soft side.”

It worked. Crouching there dripping blood like a wet-behind-the-ears recruit, he had to prove to the 130-pound woman who had taken him out that he was important. He spit out a word that sounded like, “Sar.”

“Sar?” she shouted back. “What the fuck is sar?”

“I’m sar. You’re dead meat.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you already told me that. What is sar?” She gestured again with the gun.

He glanced past her toward the terminal and relief crossed his face. “People. Go ahead and shoot.”

Kincaid was already watching them from the corner of her eye. Middle-aged couples strolling her way, still distant, but drawing closer. Too far away to hear the sound-suppressed Tavor, but they would certainly hear him scream. He used the distraction to whirl in a swift, smooth motion and dive straight off the pier exactly as he had done at Porto Clarence. He speared the water with barely a splash, slick as a dolphin.

Kincaid raced after him. This time he wouldn’t have anyone stationed under the pier to help him escape. She balanced on the edge, eyes sweeping the surface for his bubbles to see where to propel herself into the water, soles clenched to push off the concrete rim. The Tavor was waterproof. She could put a slug in him underwater if she could get close enough. There! She dug in her feet to push off hard. Suddenly she heard Paul Janson’s voice in her head. Loud, like the boss was sitting on her shoulder.

Never get in the wrong fight.

She had no business rassling an operator his size in the water, not a powerful swimmer who speared the surface without a splash. He’d use his superior weight and strength to drag her under like a raccoon drowning a coonhound.

The couples were closer, exclaiming. They had seen him dive or they saw the smoke. She was still holding the TAR-21, tucking it tight to her body. She slid it under the nearest car, scooped her handbag off the pavement, and palmed her knife into its sheath. Then she picked up the fire extinguisher and made a show of spraying the last tendrils of smoke under the Audi.

They came running as fast as they could in holiday sandals, shouting in Spanish, gesticulating wildly. Kincaid gesticulated back, pretended not to understand Spanish, pulled out her keys, climbed in the car, smiling. “Gracias, gracias.”

She started the motor, lowered the window to clasp the nearest woman’s hand. “ Gracias.Thank you. I’m okay.” She made eye contact, squeezed the plump, sweaty hand reassuringly, waved a casual adiosto the rest of them, and drove off the pier, following the signs on the Paseo de Alfonso XII that would take her to the AP-7 Autopista del Mediterráneo and out of here, hoping she had jollied them out of calling the cops.

She saw a million Traffic Group patrol cars on the limited-access toll road and a ton of radar traps. She stuck to the 120-kilometer limit and none took notice of the Audi. Home free. No one had called the cops.

Halfway to Valencia she pulled into a busy rest stop. Hungry as always after a fight, she piled a cafeteria tray high with asparagus, artichokes, mushrooms, and sardines and wolfed them down while texting Janson.

Doc jumped ship mayb Dakar.

She paused to reflect. The M-TAR-21 assault rifle, “Micro” as it was, was still a mighty big gun to wave around in public. There were two reasons a professional would risk carrying it: Its high rate of fire on automatic made it a deadly defense weapon in the event the operator had to fight his way out of a jam, but it was also extremely accurate and extremely quiet, the perfect rifle to single-shot Flannigan from the sailboat mast as he stepped off the ship.