Hacker dropped his phone and clawed out his pistol, twisting and dropping into a combat posture with such violence that he let his lantern fall and it went out. He punched his gun out in a two-handed grip and let off a wild string of shots. Seventeen rounds in his magazine, all with Ben’s name on them.

But Ben wasn’t about to let any of them find him. He dived to the hard stone floor and came lunging up in a fast, explosive forward roll to catch Carter’s corpse even as it was still collapsing. He clasped the dead man’s body against his own as a shield and felt the thudding impacts of the bullets slamming into Carter’s back. Ben had been willing to gamble that Hacker’s 9mm hollowpoints would mushroom to a halt inside the body and not penetrate all the way through. It was a hell of a way to put a theory to the test. He fired back over Carter’s shoulder, two rapid snapping rounds, but Hacker was already dancing away into the dark recesses of the dungeon, a flitting patch of darkness in the shadows that was hard to pinpoint in Ben’s gunsights. The shots ricocheted off bare stone and hummed all around the chamber like angry bees. Firing blind in this place was a recipe for getting hit with your own bullet.

Now Ben had a problem, because he couldn’t see Hacker, but Hacker could see him by the light of Banks’s fallen lantern. Ben quickly crunched it with the heel of his boot; and now the whole chamber was plunged into blackness. He darted away from where the light source had been, merging into the shadows like Hacker.

This was the moment Ben most wished he still had those damn night-vision goggles. There was dead silence in the chamber, apart from the ringing in his ears. He could sense Hacker slowly circling, watching, peeling the layers of darkness apart with his eyes to discern where his enemy was. A second later there was another deafening gunshot and a white spurt of muzzle flash from the other side of the chamber as Hacker let off another round at the spot where he thought Ben was lurking. He was six feet off target. The bullet struck sparks off the wall and carved its deadly ricochet trajectory all over the place, coming closer to hitting Ben than the original shot.

Now Ben knew where he was, and fired back. But Hacker was fast, too, and in the instant it took for Ben to register the location of the flash and set his sights on it, Hacker had already skipped away and was lost in the darkness.