Jessie had been right to shoot. The safety was off on the powerful automatic handgun, a bullet chambered. He had been a split second from death.

Márta Lang was not alone. And she had not been unguarded.

Was it possible she was still unaware of their presence? At the end of the second parlor was another doorway with an ordinary swing door, evidently opening onto the formal dining room.

There was another sound of movement, coming from within.

Janson lurched to the wall to the left of the door frame and spun around, holding his Beretta chest high, preparing to squeeze the trigger or deliver a blow, as was required. A burly man holding a gun burst through, apparently having been sent to investigate. Janson smashed the butt of his Beretta on the back of the man’s head. He went limp and Jessie caught him as he went down, gentling him to the carpet silently.

Janson stood still for a moment, composing himself and listening intently; the sudden violence had drained him, and he could not afford to be anything less than focused.

Suddenly, there was a series of loud blasts, and the swinging door was perforated by several magnumforce bullets, spraying splinters of wood and paint. Were they fired by Márta Lang herself? Somehow he suspected that they were. Janson looked at Kincaid, verifying that she, like him, was out of the line of fire, safely to the side of the doorway.

There was a beat of silence, and then the sound of quiet footfalls: Janson instantly knew what Márta Lang—or whoever it was—was doing, and what he had to do. She was going to peer through the bore holes her gun had drilled in the wooden door, assess the damage. She had established a line of fire: surely nobody would remain standing where bullets had just flown.

Timing would be everything, and Janson had very little to go by. Now! With all his strength, Janson reared up and threw himself, shoulder first, against the swinging door. It would be his weapon—a battering ram. The door moved too easily at first, and then, with a thud, it connected, sending the person on the other side of it sprawling.

It was indeed Márta Lang he saw as the door swung all the way open. The door had slammed into her, knocking her against a Hepplewhite-style dining-room table. The heavy automatic weapon in her hands had been sent flying, too, clattering to the table just a few inches beyond her reach.

With catlike agility, Lang scrambled to her feet, rounded the table, and reached for the black gleaming weapon.

“Don’t even think about it,” Jessica said.

Márta Lang glanced up to see Jessica in a perfect Weaver stance, holding her pistol with both hands. Her shooting stance said that she would not miss. Her face said that she would not hesitate.