He had a gun of his own, but it was a little .25 automatic that he’d only ever fired once, and then badly, missing the paper target with four of the six bullets in the magazine. The two that hit the paper missed anything of value. As for screams, he had plenty of those; they were still bottled up inside him. Ready to be let out if whoever was killing his people got through his office door.

That seemed likely.

Fong wondered if he should simply put the barrel of the little Raven Arms pistol under his chin and pull the trigger.

Would it work, though? He’d heard stories about people missing. Or maybe that wasn’t the right way to phrase it. Missing the right part of the brain—the part that would switch the brain off forever. Last thing Fong wanted was to be a cripple or a vegetable.

The gunfire paused for a moment.

Fong listened, praying that his people had managed to cut the invaders down. He had no idea how many there were. He’d only caught a glimpse of one man—big, dressed in body armor and wearing a helmet and balaclava. A man who moved like a soldier. There was a dog, too. Also armored. They had torn into a group of Fong’s administrative assistants. In the four seconds he’d watched, the carnage was terrible. Like nothing he’d ever seen. Fong was so far removed from anything his employers did that all he ever got to see was the sanitized versions on the news. Sure, he’d heard stories, and some of them were extreme to the point of grotesque absurdity, but that was different from actually seeing it. Those stories were abstractions. What he’d seen in the foyer of the administrative suite was brutally real.

He was aware of the historical irony of what was happening. His direct supervisor, Rafael Santoro, had chosen this building because it was in the square outside where Hermann Göring’s Nazis massacred 244 civilians from this town in retaliation for the killing of two German soldiers. Except the townsfolk were innocent—the killings had been done by partisans. The slaughter in the town square, way back in June of 1944, had had the opposite effect of what Göring intended. Instead of cowing the civilians, it had sparked an increase in guerrilla activity and gave the Germans no real peace. When the war ended, any surviving Germans were hunted and torn apart. Santoro held that up as an example of how not to manipulate people into cooperation. Fear of what might happen was always more effective than having martyrs to rally the passion of resistance.

Was irony the right word? Maybe it was karma. Or something. It was hard to structure his thoughts.

The pistol felt like a toy in his hand. Stupid little gun. Weren’t these things supposed to make him feel strong?