Abadia was watching me like he’d been struck by a gorgon’s stare. His face was like stone, and the only life I could detect was in the trembling of his eyelids.

In my time as a soldier, I’d often been in a position where something nebulous, some sort of super intuition or a sixth sense, was all that it took to warn me of danger. Whatever it was, it had saved my life on more than one occasion. But it seemed that I wasn’t the only one who had this ability.

Abadia let out a wordless cry, and he turned to Jimena and the child, shooing them back toward the house even as his anxiety transferred to his men and they began to bring up their rifles.

In a split second everything went to shit.

I had no recourse now but to shoot or die.

The man nearest me lifted his Galil, and I swept out my SIG at the same moment. My single round took him in the throat and he went over backward. His dying act was to pull the trigger of his rifle, and bullets zipped over my head, knocking roof tiles from a nearby building.

Then everything was happening around me like I was caught in some kind of slow-motion nightmare.

I lunged toward Abadia, even as the second Galil bore around on me, and the henchman from the Lincoln grabbed at a weapon inside his jacket. The man with the rifle was the immediate threat and I dropped low in a stress-fire isosceles stance as I sent two rounds into his central body mass. Ribbons of blood flew from the man’s back as he was thrown down on his side. The Galil slid harmlessly beneath the town car. Abadia had caught the boy in his arms. I couldn’t shoot him now. Anyway, the man from the car was now aiming his handgun at me. I saw the gunman squint as he targeted me, and knew that his bullet would follow a fraction of a second behind the action. I dipped my body to the left, saw his gun waver as it tried to follow, then I snapped back to the upright, leaving his aim trailing and I placed a round in his forehead.

The driver was clambering out of the car. He was a danger, but my most pressing thought was to locate Abadia—or more correctly, to see if I had an opportunity to drop him without placing the boy or his mother in danger.

I caught a snapshot glimpse of the situation and saw that it was hopeless. Abadia had the boy held tight to his chest with one arm, while his other hand was drawing a revolver from a snap-lock holster on his hip.