“Me, too,” replied Court. “I’ve got a gun on you. In case you’ve forgotten, I don’t miss very often. Whatever you are thinking about doing, just know that.”

Zack nodded to himself, then he said, “I figure I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance.”

“You give yourself too much credit.”

Zack shrugged, then he launched his body to the right by pressing his left arm and left knee into the roof with all his might. Court fired a single suppressed round, and the bullet slammed into the midsection of Zack’s Kevlar chest protection just as he rolled onto his back. Zack’s right arm shot down from his neck. In one motion he yanked the folding knife free of the scabbard, the scabbard itself opened the blade, and he hurled it across the dark roof in the direction of the flash of gunfire. Zack saw his target react, contorting his body to the left, and the spinning knife flew just past Court’s face, missing him by less than a foot.

Zack absorbed the baseball bat punch to the solar plexus from the round hitting his Kevlar, and he snatched his HK pistol out of the drop holster on his right hip. He brought it up to fire on his target, just in time to see the dark figure tumble backwards, down onto the tiles of the roof. He heard the pistol bounce along on its own, clanging down and then off of the seven-story building.

But he didn’t know if Gentry himself had fallen down the sloped roof.

Zack sprang to his knees, keeping his pistol trained on the last place he’d seen his target, and he moved laterally a few yards, careful to not appear over the roof’s edge exactly where Gentry would expect him. Slowly he moved to the end of the flat standing seam and looked down at the angled tile roof. It was dark below; he could make out little other than the trees in the courtyard at the back of the building. Right in front of him, just as the roof began to increase in pitch, was a small platform for a satellite dish, an old VHF antenna, and, alongside the VHF, Zack saw a curious-looking metal bar that came up from the platform with wires attached to it. The bar went up about one foot, then bowed down and angled out of site, down the side of the roof.

Zack took one more step forward to look on the other side of the platform, his gun up and ready, in case Gentry was hiding there.

He wasn’t. Zack then looked farther down the steeply angled roof. There, ten feet below him, he saw a figure lying against the tile. He held something in both hands.