The alarm was slowly triggering the lighting system throughout the museum, the harsh ceiling strips shimmering on, seeming to pursue them. The pealing of the electronic warning signal was deafening, but it stopped as suddenly as it had started, bringing the realization that men's and women's voices were echoing from all sides, behind, above and below, in the maze of vaulted corridors.

And ahead of them.

The firefight was brief, bloody and one-sided. The sec guards were mainly elderly, and not one of them had ever had to draw a blaster in anger. Since the appearance of the terrifying Comrade Major-Commissar Zimyanin, the numbers on duty had been doubled. But nobody had warned them that they were going to get shot at — shot at and chilled.

The confrontation took place in the gallery where the rows of dummies were hanging in their hemp collars. As the first of the guards appeared at the far end, Krysty dived for cover into an alcove, drawing her H&K P7A-13, the silvered finish gleaming in the stark overhead lighting. Ryan slid across the other side of the wide passage, blaster already in his hand, squinting around the angle of the wall to judge the threat of the opposition.

There were six of them, strung out in a line, with only a couple having bothered to draw their pistols. The rest held truncheons of dark wood.

It wasn't a moment for discussion. Ryan and Krysty needed to get past the guards, and get past them quickly. Every second would make it harder to break through and escape.

Ryan didn't need to tell Krysty what she had to do. Her gun was unsilenced and its sharp crack filled the corridor. Ryan felt the satisfying thump against his wrist as he fired the silenced 9 mm blaster. Two shots from each put down four of the Russians, all dead or dying.

Krysty's first snatched shot hit a lean woman a finger's breadth above the sterno-clavicular joint, tearing her lungs to rags of tissue, chipping the spine as it exited just below the left shoulder. Her second shot caught a man immediately behind through the throat, sending him skidding sideways, drowning in a welter of bright arterial blood.

Ryan aimed carefully. The range was less than twenty paces, under good light, but that wasn't any reason to get careless. One bullet passed through the gaping mouth of a younger man with a heavy mustache. He went down spitting teeth, blood and bits of his tongue. His hands reached to his face as though there were some way that he could pluck the full-metal jacket from the ruined depths of his brain.

A fraction of a second later Ryan chilled the woman immediately behind the dying man, a small part of his mind registering the fact that she had only one eye.

The other two sec guards skidded to a halt, paralyzed by the totality of the slaughter around them. They stared unbelievingly at the four flopping, jerking, bleeding bodies strewed about their feet.

Krysty neatly killed the man on the left with a bullet between the eyes. Ryan chilled his man with a single shot that entered just below the jaw, ripping through the larynx, emerging as a twisted hunk of lead.

The redhead was ahead of Ryan, hurdling the jumbled bodies, nearly slipping in the lake of spilled blood as she landed. She stumbled but recovered her balance and hared along the passage, Ryan at her heels. Above them, the grotesque dummies of Washington, Lincoln and Kennedy gazed blankly down at the crimson shambles.

Behind them they could hear shouts and an occasional scream. Ryan caught the distant noise of a shot being fired from a small-caliber handgun, but the bullet came nowhere near them. The body of the old man, crumpled in the pile of drapes, lay where it had fallen, beneath the broken window that opened out onto the rusting fire escape.

The flag streaming behind her like a banner of fire, Krysty jumped up and scrambled through the window, pausing on the narrow sill to grab the sack of tools from Ryan. She vanished into the night while he vaulted up behind her.

The air was black and cold, with streaks of sleet dashed across it.

A volley of shooting erupted behind Ryan as he stepped on the corroded iron steps. A pane of glass shattered at his back.

"Getting closer," he shouted, following Krysty's scarlet hair down the escape.

The retaining bolts that fixed the ladder to the outside wall of the museum groaned in noisy protest as they scrambled quickly down toward ground level. This was the point of maximum threat to their safety. Ryan knew that if the sec guards had been quick enough off the mark they'd have the perimeter covered and he and Krysty were as good as chilled.

Despite Zimyanin's warnings, life had been cozy at the establishment for far too long. The theft of the old American flag had never even been considered. Indeed, hardly anyone on the staff even knew that the banner was linked to any sort of automatic sec device. So the lights and Klaxons sent everyone into a panic.

The exterior security system hadn't been tested within living memory. It was supposed to function as a part of the internal warnings, but the wiring was old and rotten. One single floodlight came on reluctantly, but it served only to illuminate a corner of the roof, effectively blinding a sec guard armed with an assault rifle.

By the time the new director of security at the museum had nervously called up Zimyanin, Ryan and Krysty had reached safety.

"Thought you'd both taken the last train to the coast," Rick said, greeting them with a weak smile.

"What?"

"Means chilled, lover. I heard Uncle Tyas McCann say that, back in Harmony."

A sec wag went roaring by outside, a revolving red light flashing on its roof. The three friends froze a moment, but the vehicle didn't stop.

Ryan put down the sack of tools and squatted on the floor beside Rick, letting out his breath in a long sigh of relief. Krysty laid the torn remnants of the Stars and Stripes beside him and sat, shaking her head.

"Wouldn't want to do that too often," she said quietly.

"Bad?" Rick asked, reaching out to touch the tattered hem of the flag.

"Not good. Had to do some chilling. Six, was it, lover?"

Ryan was silent for a moment, replaying the firefight. "Six with blasters, and the old man I had to throttle. Seven."

"Good Russkies are dead Russkies," the freezie said, summoning up another smile.

"Like fish in a barrel," Ryan replied. "Mostly old or feebs. Never got off a shot at us. Six rounds and we laid all six in the dirt."

Krysty opened up her fur coat and leaned against the wall. "Could do with some sleep. Make our move tomorrow night."

"Guess so. It'll be like a broken ants' nest out there for the rest of the night. Yeah, I'll close my eye for a while."

Rick touched Krysty on the arm. "Thanks for saving Old Glory. And you, Ryan. I know it was an extra risk. But you had to waste 'em."

"You figure?" Krysty slipped quickly toward sleep, vaguely aware of Rick muttering to her.

"They'd have killed you if they could've." He repeated his solo conversation with an added emphasis. "Yeah, they'd have killed youif they could've."