"Backup?" Smith asked.

"Whatever happens will happen too fast for backup. We'll just pull out and leave them to pick up the pieces, explain things to the neighbors. I'm on my way."

On the sidewalk again, he watched for curtains moving, for neighborhood people, for any movement at all. Nothing. Only the distant music of radios, the rush of traffic on the avenue. He got into the taxi.

"All right," Lyons told her. "You and I go in."

He leaned down and unlocked the cuffs on her ankles. She held up her wrists. He shook his head.

"You are one dangerous lady." He stepped out of the taxi, holding the door open for her. Staring straight ahead, she left the taxi, walking quickly to the entry of the apartment house she had pointed out. Lyons watched her long, slim legs flash from the banker-blue of her long skirt. He hadn't noticed the slits at the sides of her skirt before.

That's a good sign, he thought. Fashionable young women don't die for a cause.

Half-running to catch up with her, he took her keys from his pocket, opened the door with his left hand. Fashionable skirt or not, he kept his right hand on the Uzi.

Inside, he saw a rubber doorstop. As Le Van Thanh walked to the elevator, Lyons kicked the doorstop to the threshold, pulled the door closed against it. The door remained open half an inch. It took only a second. Then he went to the elevator, pulled her away as the doors slid open.

"We'll take the stairs."

"But it is four floors up."

"You're healthy, you can do it. You first. Fast!"

She hurried up the four flights of stairs, Lyons a few steps behind her. Was she swaying her hips deliberately? Or was the supple sway just natural to her?

In the narrow, closed stairwell, he became aware of her perfume and sweat.

At the fourth floor fire door, she stopped and turned to him. "Helping you makes me a traitor to my country. I can never return. Will you help me? I will cooperate with you." She stepped closer to him, her mask of fear or fanaticism gone, her face vulnerable, her eyes searching his face for a response. She stepped closer, her small breasts almost touching him as her chest rose and fell with her breathing.

"I will cooperate completely," she pleaded, promised. "In any way you want. But save me, your government is so cruel. They will show me no pity when..."

As she snapped her knee into his groin, Lyons whipped his hips sideways to her, blocked her knee with his own. He tried to block her fists with his left hand, took her double-hand blow to his stomach, fell back against the stair rail.

Screaming in Vietnamese, she jerked open the fire door and ran into the hallway. Lyons bounced off the railing. He pressed himself against the stairwell wall next to the door, reaching for the hand-radio in his left-hand coat pocket.

But it got too noisy to speak. Slugs splintered the fire door, hammering plaster from the opposite wall. Burst after burst ripped through the door, at chest height, then at knee height, slugs gouging into the landing's linoleum.

Watching the ragged holes appearing in the door, and the sudden holes in the wall and floor, Lyons calculated where the gunman stood on the other side of the door. He waited until at least thirty shots had come through, then, betting his life that it was an AK-47 with a thirty-round magazine pointed at him, he stepped away from the wall, and fired waist-high through the door.

The stream of 9mm slugs swept the hallway the other side of the door. Lyons didn't need to open the fire door to see what he had done. Through a splinter-framed hole, he saw a blood-splashed wall and a young Vietnamese man on the floor, clutching his chest.

Lyons jerked open the door. The dead youth stared at the ceiling, his fingers knotted into the bloody mess of his chest. At his side was an AK-47 without the magazine. A full magazine lay on the hallway's carpet, in the rapidly spreading pool of blood.

Past the dead boy, Lyons saw only a window at the end of the hall. Le Van Thanh was gone.

"Politician!" Lyons called out. "You there?"

"Elevator!" said a hoarse whisper.

"The kid with the AK is dead. You see the woman?"

"She made it into this apartment."

Lunging across the wide hallway, Lyons snatched the AK-47 and the full magazine. Both rifle and magazine were slick with blood. He jammed in the magazine, chambered a round, wiped off the weapon with his coat sleeve.

AK-47 in his left hand, Uzi in his right, he crept back to the elevator. At the closed door to the apartment opposite the elevator he glanced back. Blancanales watched him from the elevator, pointed at the door, made a fist. Lyons nodded.

The AK-47 jumping awkwardly in his one-hand grip, Lyons fired bursts into the hinges and lock, then emptied the magazine through the door. Blancanales ran from the elevator, went to one knee, waited.

Suddenly, shots came from the apartment, punching into the wall by the elevator.

Lyons kicked the splintered door down, threw the AK-47 through the doorway, heard it crash into furniture. Both Lyons and Blancanales fired crisscrossing bursts into the apartment.

Blancanales dived through the doorway, low, as Lyons fired over him. He heard Blancanales exchanging fire, shots hitting the wall, breaking glass. Furniture crashed. Lyons glanced in, saw Blancanales roll behind an overstuffed velvet couch as a Vietnamese man shouldered an AK, firing a burst. Then the Vietnamese saw Lyons, and turned.

Lyons ducked back as shots ripped wood from the door frame beside his face. Then he heard the Uzi burst. The AK fire went wild. A man screamed.

Lyons looked again. The Vietnamese was gone, the window behind where he had stood was gone. The afternoon breeze flagged the curtains.

A pistol shot roared past Lyons' ear. He dropped, heard another pistol shot rip over him, then the Uzi fired again. Blancanales would be out of ammo by now. Lyons fired from the floor, rolling into the apartment. He saw Le Van Thanh aiming a pistol down at him, her hands still chained together. Lyons fired.

The first slug punched into the wall behind her, but the second and third hit her shoulder, threw bits of flesh and cloth onto the wall, and spun her violently around. She dropped to the floor. The pistol clattered against the wall. Lyons took aim at her head, but his gun was empty.

Incredibly, she came up with an AK. She watched Lyons grappling with Gadgets' satchel, trying to get the Uzi out. Meanwhile he was watching the wounded woman drop the empty magazine from the AK and try to snap in another. But with one hand on the grip, and the handcuffs still linking her wrists, she couldn't quite reach the AK's cocking lever.

Making a quick decision, he swung the satchel by its shoulder strap, the nylon bag heavy with Uzi and magazines, hand-radio and spent brass, coming down on her head hard, stunning her. She dropped the AK. Lyons swung the satchel again, saw blood gushing from her head, pouring over her face and white blouse.

Still she struggled, putting her hands out in front of her in kung-fu claws, kicking, but in the slow motion of semi-consciousness. Lyons dropped the satchel, took out his Colt Python .357, grabbed her by her lustrous black hair, smashed her in the ear with the Python's heavy barrel.

Silence. Lyons looked around, saw Blancanales jump up, kick open a door. Nothing. Blancanales looked into the room, then went in. He came out in a moment, giving Lyons the thumbs up.

Blancanales crossed the apartment, glanced into another room, searched through a closet, finally came back to Lyons. He looked down at the bleeding woman.

"She alive?"

"Sure she's alive! She's alive 'cause she has a date with interrogation. The men with hypodermics. Then she'll explain what this is all about."

He looked around the apartment again, surveying the damage.