Suddenly Seth thought about guns, familiar-sounding guns, guns on a boat on the other side of the world. And then, just as now, a fantastic tale from a woman interrupted by unseen assailants. And as his thoughts flashed back, the memory of slugs splintering their way through the decks of the Valkyrie caused his adrenaline to surge.

Seth dove away and threw himself on the floor just as the interior of the door’s paneling exploded in a hail of slugs and long jagged oaken splinters.

“Get down!” Seth yelled as he rolled across the floor. He came to a stop on his hands and knees and looked toward Yost’s chair. The old man had rolled himself out of his chair and was crawling painfully toward a telephone that rested on a small table by the window.

Slugs continued to slam through the door—their velocity mostly spent—and fly through the room at random.

At least one of the slugs maintained its momentum after its collision with the door; or perhaps it passed through an opening left by a preceding slug. As Seth watched Yost crawling across the rich Persian carpet that covered the fine hardwood floors, the slug slapped meanly into the old man’s side just below his armpit. The spot turned red almost immediately as the artery began to gush warm and red.

Yost’s body stiffened and lifted under the bullet’s impact. At that instant, time seemed distended, stretched to a point of infinite slowness. Then the scene speeded up and Yost’s body flew through the air, crashing into the rack of brass andirons, brushes, and other fireplace paraphernalia on the hearth.

Seth scrambled on his hands and knees back to the chair where he had left his coat. He pulled out the Magnum and ducked behind the chair just as the door to the study burst open.

The first man through the door shouted something in a language Seth couldn’t understand. Russian? The man took one look at Yost’s body lying by the hearth and fired his gun repeatedly into the lifeless form, causing it to jerk backward like a macabre puppet.

“Bastards!” Seth yelled as he raised the Magnum and fired at the lead attacker, a thin man in a well-tailored suit. The slug caught the man in the midsection, doubling him up and lifting him off his feet. The bullet passed through the man’s intestine, shattered his spinal column, and exited from the small of his back. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Other shouts filled the silence. He was sure the language was Russian. How had they found him? How had they traced him despite Yost’s precautions?

But there was no time to think, only time to react and survive. He fired a second shot at the men as they moved away from the study’s doorway. Their jumbled voices filled the hallway as they sought to regroup.

Anticipating their quick return, Seth scrambled past Yost’s lifeless body to the telephone. It was dead.

He was cut off. Alone. Both Yosts were dead. He fought the high-voltage panic that ricocheted through him.