Nando rolled his lips, swallowed. A notion glimmered in his eyes. “Easy solution,” he said. Keeping his trigger hand on the weapon, he fished in his pocket and came out with the shock-collar transmitter. He was breathing even harder. Beneath the unhooked top buttons of his shirt, his chest was shiny with sweat. “Now what do you have to say?”

“You’ve got the upper hand,” Evan said. “But look at you—racing heart rate, nearly hyperventilating. Now look at me. Look at me closely. And ask yourself: Do I look scared?”

Nando wet his lips.

Evan said, “The next question is, why not?”

Nando’s fist tensed around the transmitter.

Nothing happened.

He pointed it at Evan, clicked several more times, the whites of his eyes pronounced.

Evan tilted his head back, exposing his chin. He’d taken the new trash-can liner from the bathroom, folded it over six times, and wedged it into place between the metal prods and his skin. The polyethylene plastic band was just thick enough to block the electric shock.

The transmitter slipped through Nando’s fingers. He brought his hand around to the fore end of the AK.

But Evan was already airborne. His body coiled and exploded into a Superman punch, his right leg cycling forward and then pistoning back, whipping his right arm at Nando. His fist crashed across Nando’s cheek, snapping the head to the side with a crackle of vertebrae. The narco collapsed in a puddle of limbs as if his spinal cord had been ripped out of him.

No sooner had Evan landed than he heard a door open behind him. He spun around to see Manny emerge two rooms down the hall.

“Shit,” Manny said. He leaned back through the doorway, returned hoisting a shotgun with a neon orange stock.

The sling of Nando’s AK-47 was tangled around his body. There’d be no time to free the weapon. Evan swept up the handheld transmitter and ran for the stairs.

The foomp of a flexible baton round vibrated the air. Evan hunched, the beanbag glancing off his shoulder blade and decimating a wall sconce. Behind him he heard Manny jack the shotgun, chambering another round.

Evan slid onto the stairs, the next shot whistling overhead, punching straight through the drywall. The stairs hammered his back, his heels finally jarring into the first landing. Bouncing to his feet, he spun around the newel post and bounded down the next flight, nearly tripping as he spilled into the empty library of the ground floor.

Manny’s shouts echoed through the stairwell. Various radios crackled to life elsewhere in the chalet. Heavy boots pounded the marble, the guards radiating outward in the building. Their first priority would be locking down the perimeter.

So Evan ran the opposite way, toward the heart of the chalet.