That confirmed his fear that whoever these sons of bitches were, they were coming in from both directions. And they were good. He still hadn’t heard either one, and that last shot had been threaded through a gap in the pallets.

Smith grabbed the briefcase and held it behind him as he broke cover and darted toward the unseen man who had just shot at him. Crossbows were accurate, quiet, and hit like a runaway train, but they weren’t fast to reload.

A rickety staircase that ran up the side of the warehouse to his right was only a few yards away and he adjusted his trajectory toward it. Not that he had a chance in hell of getting up it, but he’d seen the outline of a single window beneath it on his way in and filed its location away in the event of a situation just like this.

The heavy briefcase hung over his shoulder was slowing him down as he tried to run, but the trade-off proved a good one when he heard a bolt slam into it from behind. With his right hand, he grabbed the support for the stairs and swung beneath them, throwing the briefcase through the window and leaping after it.

The remaining glass in the frame raked across his torso and the landing was a pile of wooden crates, but he was still breathing and a few scrapes and bruises weren’t anything that would hinder him.

Smith stayed low, tripping awkwardly across the warehouse interior toward a door warped badly enough to let the starlight bleed around it. Instead of bursting through, though, he ran his hand desperately along the wall next to it. When he found what he was looking for, he went completely motionless, trying to blend into the rough-hewn boards and watching the shattered window he’d entered through. While he’d elected to leave his night-vision gear at home, he was willing to bet that the men coming after him hadn’t.

When a dim human outline slipped cautiously into the empty window frame, Smith hit the lights. As expected, the man grabbed for his goggles, and at that moment Smith squeezed off a single round. Even for him it was a low-percentage shot—the sudden glare of the overhead lights, a partially obscured moving target, a heart rate running in the 160s. So he was surprised when the man’s head jerked back and he sank from view. Like his dad used to be fond of saying: better to be lucky than good.

Smith shoved through the door and, as suspected, someone was waiting for him out front. Also as expected, the man had lost a good second pulling off his night-vision goggles and now had to hit a backlit opponent with a medieval weapon. Advantage lost.