He tried several drawers in the woman’s kitchen, finding cutlery in one, bottles of condiments and spices in another. It was in a small pantry, next to the kitchen, that he finally found what he was looking for, and in even more plentiful supply than he had hoped. Ten boxes of Biro Super 10-gauge cartridges, twenty to the box. He pulled out a couple of boxes and crawled back to the parlor.

He heard shouts from outside, in a language he could not make out. But there was no missing the larger meaning: more men were arriving to take up perimeter positions.

In the iron pan over the fireplace, where the woman had been roasting chestnuts earlier that day, Janson placed a handful of the long cartridges, the cupped brass on either end connected by a ridged brown plastic tube. Within them was lead shot and gunpowder, and though they were designed to be detonated by the firing pin of a shotgun, sufficient heat would produce a similar effect.

The fire was slow, dying, and the pan was a couple of feet above it. Could he depend upon it?

Janson added another small log to the fire, and returned to the kitchen. There he placed a cast-iron skillet on the decades-old electric range, and scattered another handful of cartridges on it. He set the heat on medium low. It would take a minute for the element just to heat the bottom of the heavy skillet.

Now he turned on the oven, and placed the remaining fifty cartridges on the rack, a foot below the top heating element, and set the temperature on high. The oven would surely take the longest to heat of all. He knew that his calculations were crude, at best. He also knew he had no better alternatives.

He crept across the courtyard, past the stables, and climbed the rungs to the hayloft again.

And he waited.

For a while, all he heard was the voices of the men as they grew nearer and nearer, taking positions safely away from windows, communicating to one another with terse commands and flickers of their flashlights. Suddenly, a bang shattered the still air, followed, in rapid succession, with four more bangs. Then he heard the return fire of an automatic rifle, and the sound of broken glass. The old warped frames of the front window had to be a scatter of shards and dust now.

To Janson, the acoustic sequence relayed a precise narrative. The cartridges over the fireplace had detonated first, as he had hoped. The gunmen made the logical assumption. Gun blasts from within the parlor indicated that they were being fired upon. They had what they needed: an exact location.

Exactly the wrong location.

Urgent shouts summoned the other men to join the apparent gunfight in the front of the farmhouse.