A dozen steps and Leonard will reach the press marquee, its hectic hush, its delaying coffee smells. Another forty meters will take him across the waste ground and its host of silent vehicles to the Buzz. A kilometer reaches Francine in her grimy room. Ninety or so minutes on the road delivers them to their front door. It will chirrup when they open it. But before he’s even reached the corner of the wall, a restless, impish ruby light, just briefly glimpsed, detains him for a moment. Is it a cigarette? He thinks of Lucy suddenly, her skinny roll-ups, and imagines that she, like him, is hiding in the dark and waiting for her father. He stays until he catches sight of it again. This time the glow is wrong for cigarettes. Too uniform. Now it looks more like one of the car security monitors, no bigger and no brighter, except it is not pulsing. This smoldering glow is constant and moves like an unusually determined firefly, directly and unswervingly, leaving a fleeting wake of red across the weighty shadows of the street as, first, it darts along the gutter of the curb, then cuts across the pavement. It stops to fidget for an instant in the angle of a garden wall, outside the hostage house. Leonard moves along his garden wall to keep the light in sight. It’s briefly lost and then shows up again, on the wooden acorn decoration of the gatepost. The firefly hovers, its beam stretching to an oval on the swell of the carving, before crossing to the house itself and, contemptuous of gravity, rising geometrically, at speed, avoiding only windowpanes. It comes to rest on the ledge below the front bedroom.

Now there is a second firefly, roosting on the lintel above the front door, and a third, tracing its way across the brickwork of the house, looking for a perch. Leonard guesses what they are — they are familiar from films: laser beams from the telescopic night sights of power rifles. He has to rub his eyes and catch the movement of another beam before he’s able to infer an angle of origin and spot one of the marksmen. He is as dark and clothy as a country night, virtually invisible in his black gloves and balaclava. He has tucked himself into the shadow of a car and looks more like a heavy bin bag than a man. Indeed, Leonard dismissed him as a bin bag when he first inspected the street ten minutes ago. Now it is easier to spot the other men and their weapons. From where he stands, Leonard can see six in all, at the ready, fingers wrapped round triggers, hidden in the most absorbent shadows. Not Snipers Without Bullets. This hostage-taking, then, will end with bursts of gunfire first, and blood, then sirens possibly, and screaming vehicles, and Lucy weeping long into her life. Leonard shivers, not from cold. In truth, he partly wants the siege to end this way, with Maxie dead — the squads of armed, trained men, the splintered doors on both sides of the house, the clatter of their combat boots on floors and stairs, the six or so precise, intended shots that put an end to it and him the moment that a firefly settles on his head. That would be the way they’d end the siege in Hollywood.

There are other possibilities, of course, less neat, less speedy narratives, more muddled. Leonard can imagine Maxie Lermon hearing the shattered wood and glass, leaping from his guard duty, and reaching for his gun — he’s seen him all too glad to handle a gun before — determined not to be the first to be pronounced and maybe firing off a shot or two at the marksmen in the street or the shock-and-awe squads on the stairs, but in too great a panic to take aim and complete this final act, the act that justifies his rapid execution. There are other scenes in Leonard’s head, more troubling ones, more Wild West cinematic ones. There’s Maxie Lermon executing all his innocents, that unnamed family of five. There’re booby traps, there’re trigger bombs, there’s gas. There’s Maxie Lermon, with blood on his shoulder, coming out the front door of the house with a filed-down rifle at the grandma’s head, or perhaps a kitchen knife held against the youngest boy’s throat. “You fire, he dies,” he’s saying to the police. “Bring me a car. I’m out of here. A car, a car, my kingdom for a car.” And for a moment (but only in these dreams) Leonard himself is answering the call. He’s driving forward. His hands are on the steering wheel of Francine’s Buzz, her plucky runabout. It’s crashing through the barriers. Bullets wing the car. The rear screen shatters. Leonard does not stop. The front screen fills with Maxie’s face and hair.

When it happens it is quieter than in films and less heroic than in dreams. There is a soft but weighty thud first, as if a mattress has been dropped onto the ground from thirty meters up. The night is stunned. Then all at once the sleepy street springs to life. The doors of parked cars open abruptly and men in camouflage spill out onto the pavement. The hidden marksmen stand to aim their rifles more accurately at the windows and the doors. More marksmen throw back windows in the upper stories of the buildings opposite the hostage house. A pair of floodlights, concealed on the back of roofs, fill and penetrate the street, blackening the sky beyond their arcs. A now thundering helicopter, which has somehow positioned itself above Alderbeech without making a sound, trains its spy beams on the rear gardens and on the house, where a pair of men with heavy-duty weapons and clips of stun grenades can be seen sitting on the gable roof, keen to get it over with. Three armored police saloons speed in and hold off just out of rifle range, their engines racing. There is a second thud, a louder one, and then the pop of gas grenades and shouting. Inside the hostage house, the ceiling lamps, warmer than the floodlights in the street, click on in every room, almost in unison. Not a single shot is fired.

Leonard never sees the hostages. They are the last to leave their home. But from the shelter of his garden wall he has clear views of their captors. The Filipina woman, Donut Paredes, is the first to be pushed through the door and led by two armed female officers out of the front garden into the sharply lit street. She looks in better health than in the television photographs, where her face was cut, bruised, and swollen. Her hair has grown out a bit, not quite the student ponytail of her youth but black and styled. The four-day break has done her good. Her hands are cuffed behind her back, but she walks briskly, despite the restraining grip of her minders. She takes deep breaths, as if she is finding the air crisp and flavorsome. She calls out once. Not a slogan. Nothing political. Not No pasarán but “Rafaelo. Te quiero.” It’s when she’s being ducked into one of the waiting armored saloons and sees her lover, the hardened Nicaraguan, being brought out of the house, feet first, between four hefty, clumsy officers, like a struggling boy, resisting playground bullies.

Maxim Lermontov is last. The hair is unmistakable. Otherwise he is hardly recognizable. Either he has been stripped from the waist up and forced to remove his footwear or he was in the shower when the raid began. He’s slender still, but hollowed out and ribby, no longer young and toned. He’s middle-aged like Leonard now. His walk attempts to be just as insolent as it ever was, but he’s barefoot — it’s not easy to shuffle insolently without shoes. His near-nakedness and the biting cold of the morning, together with the runny eyes and hacking cough caused by whatever canisters and sprays the police have used on him, have robbed the Final Warning warrior of any majesty. He’s shivering. His head is down. His mouth is dripping phlegm. He’s looking like a cornered animal.

Leonard steps into the street, just as the day’s rain starts with a bilious thunderclap. He should announce himself, at least. He remembers the advice from Austin: “In circumstances such as this, just make it loud. And keep it short and simple, yeah?” Leonard pumps his lungs and spreads his legs. Habit almost makes him mime a saxophone. But what — apart from “Shame, shame, shame”—can he call out, except their captive’s name? Maxie. Maxim. Max. No, anyone could use those names — the police, a press photographer: “This way, Maxie, for the cameras.” Almost instinctively, then, and on his third or fourth step toward the cars lined up to take away the Final Warning trio, Leonard yells out, “Maximum.” It does the trick, amazingly. Maxie lifts his head and stares across at the familiar man who is now striding toward him. Unexpectedly, he recognizes who it is at once, though he evidently can’t recall the name — that very stiff and very English name. “It’s the fuckin’ herbivore,” he says, and tries to take a step into the street, pulling away from his escorts for a second. Leonard hurries forward now, at jogging speed. “It would have been ill-mannered and unfriendly,” he explains later in his many interviews, “to not say hi at least.” He doesn’t know what he should do when he and Maxie meet. Shaking hands is out of the question. The man is handcuffed, like his comrades. A hug would be presumptuous. They never were that close. Besides, Leonard’s damp already from the rain. He doesn’t even know what he should say, except “I’m taking care of Lucy.”