Leaving Metzger and Guarapo and their goons to engage any resistance from Calle’s troops, Rickard rushed through a garden of flowers in full bloom. He hurdled a fence and found himself on a path, white pebbles underfoot. Machine guns crackled all around him, a din sounding like New Year’s in Chinatown. Men shouted and others screamed. Rickard blocked it all out, fixating on a window at the side of the main house. As he ran, he raised his rifle and fired a short burst. Glass shattered and the curtains inside danced as the bullets tugged at them. In the next instant Rickard dived bodily through the broken window, thumping down on the top of a dresser and scattering trinkets on the floor. Continuing his roll, he came off the dresser and onto the floor. Without looking, he knew a man was rushing into the room to investigate the commotion, and he lifted his gun and fired. True to form, he heard the agonized yelp of a person mortally wounded.

Coming to his knees, he searched for other targets, but there was only one man squirming on the floor a few feet away. Rickard steadied the rifle and put a bullet into the man’s skull. Next he stood and headed for the doorway, heedless of the blood streaming from his forehead where glass had sliced him.

He’d never been inside this house before, but instinct told him the way he must go. The sharp stink of medication helped guide him too. He followed the pungent aroma along a short passageway and to a flight of stairs sloping down. The house had been erected following the contours of the cliffs, and unbeknown to any observer approaching the front, a passage led into the rock face and to a chamber surrounded by solid rock. Maybe Calle expected a nuclear strike and this was his idea of a panic room. Before entering the passage, he checked behind him. Metzger, Guarapo and the others were engaging the enemy outside the house—just as had been agreed. Gunfire and shouts made an ungodly cacophony.

Rickard checked the rooms nearest the front of the house. In one he found two men in quasi-military costumes, using an expensive leather settee as a barricade from which they returned fire through the shattered windows. They were exposed to his bullets and he riddled them each with a short burst of his assault rifle. They died without ever having realized that the house had been breached. Rickard believed there’d be other defenders in the house, but those who were an immediate threat were no more.

Quickly he retraced his steps to the flight of stairs and went down. He got another waft of medicated air, as though he’d just walked into a hospital’s emergency room. Time, he decided, wasn’t always the healer it was cracked up to be.