So she went down, hitting the pavement hard as the gunfire broke out all around her. She ducked and threw her arms and hands over her upper torso and her head. She waited to feel the impact of a slug and the searing pain that would hit her.

The gunshots resonated with a terrifying sound. The ammunition sailed all around her. In a vision that would play out in her mind forever, just like the dark bloody visions of earlier this year in Kiev, she saw the younger Guardia Civil man take a shot in the center of the chest.

The shot propelled him backward against the car, where the force of his recoiling body kept him stationary for several seconds even though his own weapon had flown from his hand and into the air. A second shot from behind her hit him and threw him sprawling onto the hood of the car, where he remained.

In the same instant, the second Guardia Civil man, the older one, fired at the man behind Alex. He got off a barrage of shots from his automatic pistol. Some of them flew directly over her prone body at the Asian. But he must have missed with every one of them because the shots from behind her kept coming in return.

Four, five, six of them. Several of the bullets impacted across the Guardia Civil man’s chest. He reeled and spun. But the final shot from behind Alex was the coup de grace. It hit the man square in the center of the face.

Alex, cringing, unable to pull her gaze away, had an excellent view. The final bullet blew away the left side of the man’s skull. The hat flew away, as did a bloody mass of brain and pulp. The body spun wildly, spasmed, tumbled over the rear trunk of the car, and rolled wildly into the Calle de la Paz.

Two dozen shots must have been fired, all in the space of a few seconds. Everything was quiet for a moment. Then Alex heard the footsteps from behind approaching her.

Alex turned her head, gasping for breath, a hot sweat soaking her, convinced that the death that she had evaded in Kiev would now find her on a Madrid sidewalk several minutes past midnight on a warm summer night.

She slowly rose with her hands against the sidewalk. Her eyes widened at the vision behind her. Bathed by the light from a streetlamp, the gunman behind her stepped forward. There was a pistol at the end of each arm.

The vision was surreal. He had carried the weapons much as he had fired them, with a precision and carriage that was almost inhuman. No wonder he had been able to fire off so many rounds at once. He had been firing with two weapons at once. But the accuracy had been as astonishing as the speed. He stood no more than twenty feet from her. And now a revised realization. He wasn’t with the fake cops at all.

Yet before him now, she was helpless. Sweat poured off her.

“Go ahead,” she said, reverting to English.

He gave a nod. “I will,” he said. He spoke perfect English.

Run, she thought. But to where? She didn’t stand a chance.

She saw him raise both weapons and take several paces forward. He stood now no more than five feet away from her. The guns came up. She looked him in the eye.

“What’s in your pocket?” he asked.

“An ice pick.”

He looked bemused. “Why? Is it snowing?”

She said nothing.

“Don’t make a move,” he advised. “Stay there.”

Both guns came up. First the left. He fired once. Then the right. He fired a second time.

She felt no impact. Why was she still alive? She turned to the fallen men in Civil Guard uniforms. He had fired a final shot into the heart of each of the prostrate bodies. Hardly necessary, but a gory punctuation point to the killings.

“They were sent to kill you,” he said in English that was almost too perfect.

“What?”

“They were sent to kill you.”

“The pietà?” she asked. “In the trunk of the car?”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “They don’t have it. The trunk was open to stuff you into it.”

He used his left hand to train one pistol on the trunk of the car and he fired several shots. Alex heard the bullets smash into the car. Then there was an explosion that propelled her several feet along the sidewalk and into a sprawling tumble. She looked back and the police car was in flames. Whatever had been in the trunk had exploded and had ignited the gasoline as well. The cruiser was an inferno.

She stared at it in disbelief, then jerked her head back to the gunman before her.

“Next time, be more careful,” he said. “I only want to rescue you once. You’d do best to get out of here fast.”

With movements that were quick and proficient, almost catlike, he tucked his pistols under his jacket. He turned and walked briskly away, not looking back. She heard sirens in the distance, drawing closer. She gathered herself and climbed to her feet. She felt some tearing to her jeans where her knee had hit the ground hard. One of her elbows was bleeding also.

The gunman was already gone. She couldn’t believe how quickly he had disappeared. She turned toward the darker end of the block and fled. Halfway back to the hotel, she found a taxi and took it the rest of the way.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 10, 2:23 A.M.

Colonel Carlos Pendraza of the Spanish Policia Nacional stood with his arms at his side on the Calle de Balsa and methodically looked at the carnage before him. A dignified man, ill-at-ease to overt manifestations of temper, he surveyed the scene and quietly seethed.

Another horrendous high profile crime on the streets of Madrid. He could tell in an instant that the two men dead in Guardia Civil uniforms were not Spaniards. Not true Spaniards anyway. It was just another example of the international gentuza-the riffraff-bringing their discontent to Spain.

When would it end? he wondered. With what would it end? Certainly the leftists in the government weren’t going to do anything to suppress this stuff. He felt a deep disgust, a deep rage, and a deep helplessness.

And he also felt a sharp echo from the past.

As a young police officer in 1973, Pendraza had been part of the police detail that had protected a man named Carrero Blanco, Franco’s hard-line prime minister and the man seen as Franco’s most likely successor.

But within six months of being named prime minister, Carrero Blanco was assassinated in Madrid by four members of ETA, a Basque separatist organization that was still dangerous in this new century.

To murder Blanco, the ETA had placed close to two hundred pounds of explosives in a tunnel they had excavated under the street. Then they had set off a blast by remote control while Blanco rode from his home to a Roman Catholic Mass. Blanco had traveled in a specially built armored Dodge Dart. Pendraza had been in the second car following the Dart and had been badly injured by broken glass and hugely traumatized by the events of the day.

The blast catapulted Blanco’s vehicle over the church it was approaching. It landed on a second-floor balcony on the other side of the street. In a macabre touch, its twisted remains remained to this day on display, part of a grim memorial at the Spanish army museum. The explosion only took place about a half block from the United States Embassy.

Henry Kissinger, then the US Secretary of State during the Nixon administration, had been visiting Spain at the time. Had Kissinger been Catholic, not Jewish, Kissinger might easily have been in the car with Carrero Blanco at the time, and the ETA would have taken out a US cabinet member as well as their own prime minister.

This incident was the origin of the modern widespread practice of sealing manholes when a high profile procession is to take place.

This assassination, dubbed Operación Ogro by those who carried it out, was in retaliation for the execution of five political opponents by the regime and was applauded by many opponents of Franco’s regime.