Sam flung open the pantry door, turned on the light, and looked inside. There was a barrel about five feet deep and three feet in diameter. He took off the top. “Flour,” he said. He tilted it and rolled it to the middle of the floor.

“What are you doing?” asked Remi.

“I need two ounces of flour per cubic yard of air,” he said. “Help me.” He pushed over the flour barrel, lifted flour with both arms, and tossed it into the air. Remi did the same. He ran to the far side of the kitchen, where there was a big fan on a five-foot stand. He turned it on and aimed it at the big pile of spilled flour. In a couple of seconds, it was blowing it into the air, filling it with the fine white powder, turning the air in the kitchen into a cloud. “Get in the pantry,” he said, then picked two pie pans off the counter, knelt on the floor, and tossed panfuls of flour into the air as fast as he could.

He looked around him, seemed to judge that things were going the way he wanted, and ran to the pantry to join Remi. He shut the door, flopped down beside her with the light still on, pushed some dish towels under the door, and put his arm over her. She said, “A flour bomb, Sam?”

“Almost anything explodes if you treat it right,” he said. “Once there’s enough flour in the air, the electric stove starters should ignite it. Close your eyes, cover your ears, and open your mouth. Do not raise your head.”

They lay still. Then there was a terrible moment when the light in the pantry went dark. There was no longer a sound of fans or the clicking of the electric starters on the stove. “Well, that’s that,” he said.

“That’s what?”

“They turned off the main circuit breaker. No igniter.”

In a single avalanche of sound, the doors on both sides of the kitchen banged, assaulted by men using heavy objects as battering rams. They heard many footsteps outside, men dashing toward the back of the house. Sam used the charging lever to load the first round into the chamber of the Škorpion he had taken from the guard. He reached up to turn the knob of the pantry door and opened it a crack. The fans had stopped and the white flour was suspended in the perfectly still air, so thick it was difficult to see across the room, difficult to breathe. In an instant, Sam foresaw what was about to happen. He yanked the door shut, held Remi down and kept his body over hers. “Stay down.”

A kitchen window shattered onto the floor, and a machine pistol began to spray bullets and sparks of burning powder into the room—Bwaah!—and those sparks were enough.