She used her phone to photograph the covers of the catalogs, then put the thumb drives from the two envelopes into her jacket pockets and zipped them shut.

She headed for the kitchen, where she had entered the house and could expect to leave it safely. As she stepped into the kitchen, she glanced at the refrigerator. She should take a look at the food in there to see how long Martin Ortega had been gone.

Leah opened the refrigerator, and as she did, two things happened. The bulb above the top shelf of the refrigerator turned the dark room into a lighted one, and a fearsome shape she’d seen and touched only in training sessions, egg-shaped with incised sections that had earned it the nickname “pineapple,” tumbled from the spot where it had been propped against the refrigerator door into the empty air in front of her.

Leah saw the grenade fall and hit the kitchen floor, and saw the safety lever that was usually held in place by a pin fly off as the grenade bounced. She knew that when the lever came off, the striker inside hit the cap, and she had three to five seconds before the fuse burned down to the explosive charge.

Leah went to one knee on the floor and snatched the grenade up with one hand while she opened the door of the dishwasher beside her with the other. She tossed the grenade into the lower basket, slammed the door shut so it locked, and then sprang forward and scrambled across the floor toward the dining room like a crab. She made one last effort and launched herself through the doorway just as the fire in the fuse reached the explosive.

The grenade detonated, and the shock hit Leah like a moving wall. The dining room floor seemed to rise to meet her, and in the kitchen, the door of the stainless-steel dishwasher, dented and pierced by shrapnel, flew across the room and stuck in the wallboard. The tiled counter was heaved upward, separating tiles and sloughing them off onto the floor. The cabinets surrounding the dishwasher were blown to splinters, and a spout of water erupted from one of the broken pipes under the sink.

In the dining room, Leah was lying on the wooden floor gasping for breath with her hands still pressed to her ears. Either the belly flop or the concussion had knocked the wind out of her.

The noise had been deafening. She managed to push herself up off the floor and stagger across the kitchen to the back door. She went down the steps as quickly as she could manage, walked with determination until she could balance well enough to run, and made it to her parked car.