“Ratfuuuuuuuuck!”

The circle of halogen lowered from my neck, angled to the side, away from my body.

“He’s gone.”

“Get him out of the way.”

The twin dots arced away from me, out and up, clean and safe, firing lines staying clear of their partner.

The halogen cut rapidly up the wall.

“Sorry, old man.”

The butt of his shotgun swung upward at the side of my head.

I lurched to the side, drooling a little more, the light synthetic stock missing me by an inch, putting its owner off balance, allowing time for a couple things to happen.

First, giving one of the TARs time to start to berate the Remington.

“Get your shit together…”

The second thing it allowed time for cut off whatever else might have been said, as I took advantage of my attacker’s lack of balance and also took away his shotgun.

Of course there was more to it than that. He wasn’t a child with a lollypop; I didn’t simply pluck it from his hands. What I did was deliver a tightly coordinated series of blows, slapping the barrel of the shotgun to the side, kicking him in the stomach, chopping him in the throat, removing the shotgun from his limp hands, and using the base of the stock to crush his nose. This caused the halogen to race around the room while also putting the disarmed man and me in complicated proximity, the combination and suddenness of all this creating a fair amount of confusion for the two TARs.

Which is why their employer, whoever it may have been, might be expected to forgive them for not getting off a shot at me before I had emptied the remaining five rounds from the Remington 870 MCS, now in my hands, at their heads.

They were buckshot cartridges, double-aught, a bit of overkill in my book. I used two on one, three on the other, alternating between them until the weapon was empty. Then I dropped it, falling to the side, diving for cover under the worktable, drawing my Les Baer.45 Custom from the horizontal shoulder holster under my jacket and waiting there, patiently, holding aim on the doorway by the light of a computer monitor that had flared to life when a mouse had been jostled in the middle of the action incident.

I might have held that aim for an hour just to be certain there were only the three, but the man whose shotgun I had taken groaned, reminding me that I had best conclude my business.

I got out from under the worktable, checked the two dead bodies for ID, and found none. Nor any watches or jewelry, though one had a telltale band of white skin around his otherwise distinctly olive wrist, and the other a similar band around his left thumb, as well as piercings in both earlobes.

The third man groaned again. And then the Mace chimed. I went up the ladder and retrieved the newly burned CD and slipped it into my sport coat pocket. I hadn’t yet inspected the material for stains or rips. I couldn’t stand the thought that I might have damaged Mr. Lee’s handiwork. His garments were, literally, irreplaceable. Putting that inspection off until later, I touched some buttons on the Mace, confirming twice that yes, I did want to erase all contents of the hard drive, and went back down the ladder.

There was now a considerable amount of confusing physical evidence in the room. And no time to tend to it efficiently.

For a moment this created an unpleasant frisson. The idea of leaving the room without bringing to it some order, without grooming it to tell a story that did not include me, was almost unbearable.

I touched my phone. I held it in one hand and the Les Baer with the matching finish in the other. I thought about a gardenia bush on my deck at home, how, three years ago, after a week of unprecedented rainfall, it had blossomed, flowering in utterly spontaneous perfection, no bloom out of place or proportion to the others, a jewel of nature.

My breathing continued to race.

The man on the floor groaned again.

I asked him, gasping, who he and his partners were, by whom employed, and to what purpose. He groaned again, the tone of it telling me that he was not sensible enough to understand what I was asking.

I shot him. Once. Thought carefully. And shot him again. And my breathing began to even out. Not that killing the man brought any peace in and of itself. But the new symmetry in the room, the assortment and sprawl of all the dead bodies, was drawn into new balance by those two bullets, and I could move again.

Down to the end of the alley where I had parked the Acura between two Dumpsters and shoved some of the heaped garbage onto its roof, giving it a cosmetic air of abandonment. From the passenger seat I retrieved my Tumi, drawing from it a shaped Octol charge. Intended to punch holes in armor plating while blasting molten alloy through the hole, it was a device less than ideal for my purposes. But with a slight modification it would do. Taking the five-gallon gas can that the Thousand Storks motor pool always bungeed securely in the trunks of their vehicles, I went back to the gold farm and placed the charge at the mouth of the open inner door, with the can of gas just in front of it. Thus modified, the Octol would not create order in the room full of dead people, but it would make them all strangely equal to one another.

Driving away, I found an unlocked black Range Rover just before the street, facing out, ready for a speedy but never-to-be getaway. There was nothing of interest. Three black nylon athletic bags filled with the odds and ends of a tactical operation. Spare clips, black gaff tape, an assortment of plastic buckles and straps, a small tool kit, and various components for converting the TARs to 9 mm. That kind of thing.

I wasn’t surprised by the lack of identifiers. Men like the professionals I’d killed couldn’t be expected to leave their wallets behind in their car. Granted, yes, they could be expected to be suspiciously armed with weapons favored by the Israeli military and to wear the five-pocket, guyabera-style jackets favored by the Shabak secret service, but they were still very good at what they did. So I ignored the plates I knew would be dead ends, copied the VIN from the tag on the dash, for form’s sake, dropped another Octol charge in the Range Rover, and drove away.

Just down the street I heard the whomp of the gasoline-modified charge going off, followed shortly by the sharper bang of the explosive in the SUV. The flames would reduce the gold farm and at least a few of the surrounding abandoned buildings to ash long before any emergency services could respond. Not that it was likely they would.

Back at LAX I realized that I had neglected to call the pilot in advance of my arrival. The thirty minutes needed before we could be cleared to take off had to be passed in some manner. As it turned out, he had no objection to my suggestion as to how we could spend the interval. And the door gunner was perceptive enough to take a hint and wander off to smoke a cigarette or three.

There was little enough time for conversation, but it turned out that he was indeed a legionnaire. A faded regimental tattoo on his shoulder giving evidence. He noticed my own age-spotted Special Forces tattoo and made a joke about soldiers and what really happens in foxholes, though neither of us laughed. The back of a helicopter is hardly conducive to romance, but it was far from the most uncomfortable place I’ve made love. And after the most pressing business was taken care of, there were still a few minutes left. So we held hands, his thumb returning again and again to rub a callus on the inside of my right index finger, just where it fits the trigger.

Soon after, we were airborne, headed north, the first step on my campaign to erase all evidence and record of the object I had been sent for now complete. There would, no doubt, be more to do once I looked at the security DVD and saw who it was who had come to call ahead of me.