He parked his patrol car, climbed out, and put his hand on the hood of the Honda. It was warm. In this weather a car hood wouldn’t stay warm two minutes after you turned it off.

He surveyed the area with his flashlight. There were no lights on in the street, no signs of anything odd going on.

He considered what to do. He didn’t really want to scare some family by waking them up for nothing. But if a B and E was happening on his watch, he was damn well going to stop it. Leyland Millwood was a three-year veteran of the PW County force. He’d been driving around in the middle of the night rounding up drunks and giving speeding tickets to teenagers and stopping disabled veterans who’d forgotten to turn their lights on. He was ready to move on to something more exciting—possibly Special Investigations. A few good collars would get him noticed, and he would redeem them for a ticket out of this wilderness of boredom.

He approached the front door of the house and banged on it with the butt of his flashlight.

Verhoven’s eyes widened when he heard the banging on the front door. He turned and strode toward the front of the house, his AR-15 at loe wd gw ready. He looked a little panicky, like maybe he was itching to shoot somebody.

“Wait!” Tillman whispered sharply. “Just . . . wait. Don’t do anything.”

Tillman bounded to the door, pulled out his utility knife, and stabbed the wall. Behind the Sheetrock he found the back of the intercom unit that faced the outside of the building. Beneath it was a piece of armored conduit running down through the wall. He yanked the conduit free of the connector in the base of the intercom, then severed the wire inside it with one swift stroke of the knife. Then he looked through the window. A very young, pugnacious-looking cop stood on the front porch, looking warily at the front door.

“Another two seconds, that man up in the safe room would have been talking to the cop out there,” Tillman whispered.

“Who is it?” Verhoven said softly. His gun was now pointed directly at the door.

Tillman ignored his question, instead whispering, “Get Lorene’s clothes off. Everything but her bra and panties.”

“Why? What are you doing?”

“Just do what I tell you to do.”

Verhoven stood there, as if deciding what to do. He clearly didn’t like taking orders.

“Focus on her clothes. Let me call this play, okay?” Tillman tried to compress all the urgency he felt into his whispered voice. He couldn’t let Verhoven open the door. He’d have to stop him, effectively ending the operation he and Gideon had already put themselves on the line for.

Verhoven glared at him for a moment, before he finally relented. Verhoven was mostly bluff—and in his heart he probably knew it. They were deep into the weeds now, and Verhoven was smart enough to recognize that Tillman was better equipped to get them through this.

Tillman sprinted up the stairs two at a time, running to the bedroom, then dumping clothes from the chest of drawers onto the floor until he found a cotton nightgown. He bounded back down the stairs to find a drawn-looking and nearly naked Lorene Verhoven standing unsteadily in the middle of the room.

“Arms up,” he said.

She put her arms in the air, wincing at the pain in her side. As though he were dressing a child, he slid the nightgown down her arms and over her head. There was a small amount of blood weeping from the dressing on her flank.

There was more banging at the door.

“Perfect,” he said, mussing her hair so she looked as though she’d been roused from bed. “The guy out there is a cop. Go to the door, tell him you’re fine. Whatever you do, don’t let him in the house.”

She nodded, walked stiffly to the door. Tillman motioned to Verhoven to hide out of sight in the dining room. Verhoven retreated, his AR-15 aimed at the door.

“Be cool,” Tillman mouthed as Lorene neared the door.

She opened the door, looked out. “Yes?” she said.

“Officer Millwood, PW County, ma’am. Is everything okay?Rt="nd 21;

“Excuse me?”

“Is everything okay? A neighbor said there was a car circling the street, and now it’s parked outside your house.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Lorene scratched her head. “My husband went out to get some coffee. He knows I can’t be without it when I wake up.”

“You’re sure?”

“Look, I appreciate you’re doing your job. But my shift at the hospital starts in an hour, and I’d really like to enjoy that coffee and get myself ready.”

Officer Millwood stood there but made no move to leave. “I’m sorry if this sounds out of place, ma’am, but you don’t look well.”

“I’m just a little under the weather. But thank you for asking. Stay safe out there.” She closed the door and sagged against the wall, breathing hard. There was a bloody spot on her side about the size of a tangerine, seeping into the white cotton fabric of the nightgown.

Verhoven dropped his weapon and propped her up. “You did great, baby,” he said.

He kissed her forehead, but her eyes seemed to lose focus.

“Baby, I need to lie down now,” she mumbled.

“Of course you do.” He carried her across the living room, set her on the couch. Her face was misted with perspiration and her complexion had gone gray again.

“She needs fluids,” Tillman said.

Verhoven looked down at her bleakly, his eyes unfocused. His body sagged, like a marionette with its strings cut. Tillman had seen it happen many times before. A soldier during combat would run on adrenaline for hours, performing just fine—and then suddenly they’d just fall off a mental cliff.

“Jim,” Tillman said. “You with me? We’re making history here. Nothing this big every comes easily. Operations like this always get bad before they get good again.”

After a moment, Verhoven nodded.

The thing Tillman didn’t say is that sometimes things got bad before they got worse. And then everything fell apart and people died for nothing. In combat you never knew which one it was going to be. And now it was up to him to make sure this wasn’t the kind of op where the good guys ended up facedown in a ditch.

Tillman walked up the stairs, found the intercom on the wall next to the safe room, and pressed the button.

“Hi there, sir,” he said. “My name is Bob and I’m here to make sure that you and your two beautiful daughters walk out of that room entirely safe and unharmed.”

A man’s voice came back immediately. “This is a fortified safe room, you son of a bitch,” the man said. “I don’t know if that means anything to you. But we’ve got food, water, Class III air filtration, weapons, and ammunition in here. The walls are made of solid reinforced concrete and the door is inch-thick steel plate. Take whatever you want from the house and leave. You’ll never get us out of here.”

“Sir, I apologize for the stress we’re putting you through, but the fact is, we will get in there. And we’ll do it in approximately five minutes.”

“Not unless you have—” The man stopped himself abruptly.

“You were going to say ‘Not unless you have plastic explosives.’” Tillman dangled the roll of ribbon charges in front of the camera. “This is a C4 breaching charge. You’ll notice it has a curved anterior surface formed from a thin wafer of copper. This curve concentrates the blast wave into a one-centimeter-wide area, simultaneously converting the copper to a superheated plasma jet that will cut through one-inch plate like a knife through butter. In order to improve the blast strength, I’ll hang about twenty Ziploc bags full of water on the back side of the ribbon charges. This will provide inertia, which will increase the energy of the blast tenfold. It will also dampen the noise of the blast so that your neighbors are none the wiser.”

He began sticking the ribbon charge to the big steel door, running a band of it all the way around the outside of the door.