Discovering that Joe Hunter had survived the explosion and had tracked him back here was next. He had really believed that Guarapo’s grenade had torn Hunter to pieces and he couldn’t imagine how he’d got out of that room alive. He supposed that how wasn’t an issue now, only that Hunter was there and firing at him in the attic space. Hunter had hit him, but the armor had kept him safe.

Breaking through onto the roof of the hospital maybe hadn’t been his greatest plan, but it was all he had left to him. Hunter had shouted to someone down below, cutting off his escape that way. On the roof he was forced to run like a coward to avoid being pinned down by the HRT troopers at ground level. He’d gone up and over the peak, had only made it there before he heard machine-gun fire. When he looked back over the roof, there was Hunter in all his glory, wide open for a killing shot. Hunter, unlike him, didn’t have the benefit of a bulletproof vest.

Hunter’s return shot struck him in the chest, knocking him backward, but not before he saw his nemesis hit in the leg and tumbling toward the roof’s edge. Nowhere for Hunter to go but down.

Biggest shock of all was that Hunter had died after all this by falling off a roof.

Rickard touched the spot where Hunter’s bullet had hit him in the chest. The vest was punctured, singed stuffing poking out of the hole, but the flattened slug must have fallen out as he slid down the roof. If he hadn’t been wearing the vest he’d be a corpse, no doubt about it. Hunter’s bullet had struck him dead center. That was some shooting. Admirable in a way.

He wasn’t going to dwell on it.

Hunter was dead but there were others out there who were equally dangerous. Jared Rington, for example; and who knew who else had been drafted in to bring him down?

He was at the front of the building now. Here the balustrade was taller and more ornamental, providing better cover from the troopers running around the front and taking up positions. If he’d had the sniper rifle with him he was confident that he could take them all out one by one. But the reality was that it was now he who’d have to be careful not to fall into the sights of a sharpshooter.

He checked his weapons. He unscrewed the suppressor from his gun, then fed a fresh magazine into it. He touched his knife in its pouch.