In that moment he saw himself holding the thing—a Glock 17—all those years ago. Standing with the weapon pointed at a door, his hand shaking, and his head full of doubt about whether it would fire. In that memory, he had just cleared a jam and chambered a new round.

A Glock with one in the pipe. No safety. Ready to rock.

For Danica, it unfolded so quickly there was hardly time to react.

A second and a half earlier, Dryden had been next to her on the metal cart. She had seen his head roll to the side and then back. For whatever reason, that body language had seemed like the picture of resignation. Of defeat. In its own way, it had unnerved her more than even the guns had.

Then had come that snapping sound—Dryden’s zip-tie, it had to be—and he was gone, rolling into the dark, his elbows and hands scrambling on the concrete, a rush of crazed motion and sound.

Now she could see Pierce’s security people reacting, their heads turning, their bodies and flashlights pivoting. From Dryden’s direction there came a scrape of something metal on the floor, and an instant later the room exploded in gunfire—all of it from Dryden’s position.

Danica flinched and tried to cover her ears, but her wrists were still bound beneath her. She saw the flashlights in the room suddenly jumping and jerking, swinging wildly in random directions. She saw bodies falling, collapsing into one another. Others were looking around, frantic, bunching together as if for safety—but they were hit too, all of them going down in a tangle of limbs.

She saw Dryden come charging forward in a crouch, dropping a handgun with a clatter on the floor, grabbing the machine gun from one of the fallen men, rising up and shouldering it and firing fast little bursts into the pile of bodies on the other side of the cart. He was taking aim, shining the light from one to the next, shooting and moving on, shooting again. Now he dropped the machine gun and picked up another, and just stood there shining the light from body to body, making fast but thorough moves.

He stopped on someone. Danica turned her head on the cart, and in the flashlight glare she saw the blond woman, sprawled with the bodies of two men—tangled up with them, pinned down by their dead weight.

But she was alive. She stared up at Dryden, squinting into the beam of the flashlight.

“Show me your hands,” Dryden said.

One of the woman’s hands was already visible, empty. The other was out of sight beneath one of the bodies that held her in place. She glanced down at that hand, then back up at Dryden, her expression betraying some desperate calculation.

Dryden fired a burst into her forehead and she flopped backward, out of Danica’s view behind the dead men.