Jack leaned hard against the locked emergency door so that when Lian swiped her security card it pushed open without a bang. He drove straight across the floor toward the glass-walled control station while Lian cut low and right, using the workstations for cover. Jack assumed if they were guarding the floor they’d expect someone to come in through the front and not the stairwell.

Jack was half right.

Two steps in, Jack saw a Caucasian man startle in front of him. He raised the pistol in his hand toward Jack. Too slow. Jack’s gun was already up. He put a round through the man’s throat. The lead passed clean through and smashed in a bloody spiderweb against the control-room glass, alerting a second killer standing next to a third man in a flat cap towering over Paul, blade in hand.

Two shots rang out on his right, one large-caliber and the other small, followed by the sound of tinkling glass.

Jack didn’t have time to turn around and look—he was drawing a sight on the man charging out of the control room with a gun already pointing at him.

“LIAN!”

“CLEAR!”

Jack fired two rounds into the man’s broad chest, spinning him like a top, but not before he got a round off. Jack swore his upper right arm got hit with a blacksmith’s hammer. It turned him a quarter-step—and it saved his life.

The man with the blade standing over Paul had turned calmly and raised a small-caliber pistol in a confident, one-handed draw. Jack swore there was a smile beneath the man’s thin pencil mustache when he fired. But the hit that turned Jack took him out of the path of the smiling man’s bullet—a headshot. The slug zooped past Jack’s ear like an angry hornet.

Jack returned fire. Two rounds shattered the man’s forehead just beneath his flat cap as a third punched in just below his nose. The man flew backward, crashing into Paul, then tumbled to the ground.

Jack charged forward and kicked the dead man’s pistol out of reach, then secured his own weapon. He saw Lian clearing the weapons and checking the pulses of the two others Jack had shot.

“Paul! Where are you hurt?” Jack instantly regretted the question. Paul’s forearms were duct-taped to the chair, and the tips of the fingers of his left hand oozed blood.

“Jack, I’m sorry—”

“Where’s the USB?”

“It’s loaded!”

Jack glanced at the monitor behind Paul. EXECUTED flashed in red. The virus was launched.

Jack ripped apart the duct tape with his fingers as Paul burbled, red-eyed and snotty. “He made me give him the passcode . . . I tried . . . I couldn’t . . .”

“It’s all right.”

Lian dashed into the room. “All clear.” She saw Paul’s hand. She gasped. “I’ll get the medical kit!” She ran back out of the room.