Then he jerked the trigger like a boy on the .22 rifle range at summer camp.

Just as Jodie leapt out of the way, pushing the cops with him aside.

How the fuck d’you miss that shot, Soldier? Repeat fire!

Sir, yes, sir!

He got off two more rounds but Jodie and everyone else was under cover or crawling fast along the sidewalk and street.

And then the return fire began. First a dozen guns, then a dozen more. Mostly pistols but some H&Ks too, spewing the bullets so fast they sounded like unmuffled car engines.

Bullets were striking the elevator tower behind him, showering him with bits of brick and concrete and lead and sharp, craggy copper jackets from the slugs, cutting his forearms and the backs of his hands.

Stephen fell backward, covering his face with his hands. He felt the cuts and saw tiny drops of his blood fall on the tar paper roof.

Why did I wait? Why? I could have shot him and been gone.

Why?

The sound of a helicopter speeding toward the building. More sirens.

Evacuate, Soldier! Evacuate!

He glanced down to see Jodie scrambling to safety behind a car. Stephen threw the Model 40 into the case, slung the backpack over his shoulder, and slid down the fire escape into the alley.

The second tragedy.

Percey Clay had changed her clothes and stepped into the corridor, slumped against the strong figure of Roland Bell. He put his arm around her.

The second of three. It hadn’t been their mechanic quitting or problems with the charter. It had been the death of her dear friend.

Oh, Brit . . .

Imagining him, eyes wide, mouth open in a soundless shout, charge toward the terrible man. Trying to stop him, appalled that someone would actually be trying to kill him, to kill Percey. More indignant and betrayed than scared. Your life was so precise, she thought to him. Even your risks were calculated. The inverted flight at fifty feet, the tailspins, the skydiving. To spectators, it looked impossible. But you knew what you were doing and if you thought about the chance of an early death, you believed it would be from a bum linkage or a clogged fuel line or some careless student who intruded into your airspace.

The great aviation writer Ernest K. Gann wrote that fate was a hunter. Percey’d always thought he meant nature or circumstance—the fickle elements, the faulty mechanisms that conspire to send airplanes hurtling into the ground. But fate was more complicated than that. Fate was as complicated as the human mind. As complicated as evil.

Tragedies come in threes . . . And what would the last one be? Her death? The Company’s? Someone else’s?

Huddling against Roland Bell, she shivered with anger at the coincidence of it all. Thinking back several weeks: she and Ed and Hale, groggy from lack of sleep, standing in the glare of the hangar lights around Learjet Charlie Juliet, hoping desperately they’d win the U.S. Medical contract, shivering in the damp night as they tried to figure out how best to outfit the jet for the job.