- In the lobby of Hendley Associates, night security manager Wayne Reese looked out the glass doorway to the parking lot and saw the Baltimore Gas and Electric truck pull up to the door.

Reese reached down to the Beretta pistol on his hip, and he thumbed the leather strap that secured it in the holster. This did not feel right.

One man walked up to the front door and held his ID badge up. Reese stepped up to the door, shone his flashlight on the badge, and determined that it looked legitimate. He turned the bolt lock and opened the door slightly.

"You guys sure are on the ball tonight. The power hasn't been off three-"

Reese saw the black handgun appear from the man's tool belt, and he knew he'd made a grave error. With all the speed he could muster he slammed the glass door, but a single round barked from the suppressed Five-seveN pistol, shot through the narrow opening, and hit him in the solar plexus, knocking him back onto the floor.

As Reese lay on his back, he tried to lift his head to see his murderer. The Asian man pushed through the unlocked door and stepped up to him. Behind him, several more men appeared out of the back of the van.

The shooter stood over Reese, raised his pistol to the wounded man's forehead, and then Wayne Reese's world went black.

- Crane entered the building just as Quail shot the security officer a second time. Crane and five of his men shouldered their Steyr TMP machine pistols and took the stairs, leaving Grouse on the ground floor to watch the parking lot. One at the entrance was not optimal, but Grouse had a headset that kept him in constant touch with the rest of the operators, so he would serve more as a tripwire if there were any threats downstairs.

Crane knew tonight would be taxing on his small force. He had lost Wigeon this morning during the attempted assassination of Melanie Kraft on the Rock Creek Parkway. Additionally, Grouse had been shot in the left thigh. He should have been out of action with this injury, but Crane had ordered him to come on this operation tonight, principally because the Hendley Associates building was quite large, and therefore Crane needed all the men he could muster.

The building was nine stories tall, impossible to clear and search with this force, but Crane knew from Ryan's phone intercepts and Center's research on the Hendley Associates network before it went dark the previous day that the second floor was IT, the third floor was the intelligence analyst staff, and the ninth floor was the location of the executive offices.

At the second-floor exit, three men peeled off of the six-man tactical train. They would search here and then on the third floor, while Crane and two others rushed directly up to the top floor.

Quail, Snipe, and Stint moved up the darkened second-floor hallway with their silenced machine pistols at the high ready.

A security officer walking with a flashlight in his hand came out of a room backward, locking the door behind him, and then he turned to head back to the stairwell. Stint shot the man four times, killing him instantly.

In a large office toward the back of the IT department, the three Chinese operators found a heavyset white man in his fifties at his desk. His office door said he was Gavin Biery, the director of information technology.

The men had been ordered to take everyone who did not offer resistance alive and keep them alive until the network system could be rebooted and the drives reformatted. There were references to Center, Tong, Zha, and several of the operations that linked Center to the Chinese PLA and MSS, and these needed to be scrubbed from the hard drives of the servers before the company became front-page news after a mass murder there.

The data storage of Hendley Associates, it had been determined, was too large and well dispersed to simply blow up. Instead they needed to wipe the memory of the entire operation clean, and for that they would need employees of the company so they could find out passwords and the location of any offsite data storage.

After Biery was tied up they found two more IT men on the second floor, and then they headed up to the Analysis department on the third floor.

- Crane, Gull, and Duck left the stairway on the ninth floor, and they too encountered a security officer in the hallway. This man recognized the threat immediately, however, and he moved laterally while drawing his Beretta pistol. Crane and Duck both got shots off but missed; then the guard fired two rounds up the hall, missing just high both times.

A second burst from Crane's Steyr TMP caught the guard in the lower torso, sending him spinning to the ground dead.

Without a word between them, the three Chinese men began sprinting up the hall.

- What in God's name was that?" exclaimed Gerry Hendley. He and Sam Granger were in the conference room, trying to work under dim emergency lights and lighting from a sliver of moon through the large windows.

Granger leapt to his feet and rushed to a small broom closet in the corner. "Gunfire," he said gravely. He opened the broom closet and retrieved a Colt M16 select fire rifle. It was loaded and kept here in case of emergency.

Granger had not fired a rifle in many years, but he deftly pulled back the charging handle, motioned for Hendley to stay right where he was, and then swung out into the hall with the gun raised in front of him.

Crane saw the man appear at the end of the hall some fifty feet away. The American saw Crane and his two operators at the same time, and he fired a short burst from his rifle. Crane dove for cover behind a planter by the elevator but then immediately rolled back out on the floor and fired an entire magazine from his machine pistol.

Sam Granger's knees buckled as the rounds tore into his chest. An involuntary muscle spasm in his arm and hand caused him to squeeze off another three-round burst as he fell backward into the conference room.

Crane looked back over his shoulder; Duck had been shot through the forehead by the suited man's M16 rifle. He now lay flat on his back, a pool of blood growing in the dark hall.

Gull and Crane rushed forward, leapt over the dead American, and entered the conference room. There, an older man in a tie and shirtsleeves stood near a table. Crane recognized him from a picture he'd been sent by Center. He was Gerry Hendley, director of Hendley Associates.

"Put your hands up," Crane said, and Gull rushed in, knocked the old man onto his desk, and secured his hands behind his back.

SIXTY-NINE.

Crane had his men bring everyone into the conference room on the second floor. There were nine individuals other than the three security officers and one executive they killed during the initial attack, and they were all bound at the wrists behind their backs and seated in chairs by the wall.

Crane called his controller and had the power restored to the building, and then he addressed the group in a monotone and heavily accented voice.

"We will bring your computer network back online. We need to do this quickly. I will require your passwords to the network and a description of each of your duties and access levels. There are many of you here; I do not need you all." With the same monotone voice he said, "If you refuse to help, you will be shot."

Gerry Hendley spoke up: "If you let everyone else go, I will give you whatever you want."

Crane had been facing away, but he turned back to Hendley. "No talking." He lifted his machine pistol, pointed it at Hendley's forehead. He held it there for a moment.

His earpiece chirped. He put his hand to his ear and turned away. "Ni shuo shen me?" What did you say?

- In the lobby, Grouse knelt down behind the reception desk and repeated himself softly: "I said an old man and a girl are coming to the front of the building."

Crane replied, "Don't let them in."

"He has a key. I see it in his hand."

"Okay. Let them in then, and take them. Hold them down there until we have what we need here, in case they have passwords we require."

"Understood."

"Do you need me to send someone else down with you?"

Grouse winced with a fresh throb of pain in his wounded leg, but he quickly said, "Of course not. It's an old man and a girl."

John Clark and Melanie Kraft entered Hendley Associates' lobby, and immediately Grouse stood up behind the reception desk and pointed his Steyr machine pistol at them. He had them put their hands on their heads and turn back to the wall; then he limped over to them and frisked them with one hand while keeping the weapon trained on their heads.

He found a SIG Sauer pistol on the old man, which was a surprise. He pulled it out of a shoulder holster and stuck it in his waistband. On the woman he found no weapons, but he relieved her of her purse. He then had them stand against the wall in the elevator lobby with their hands on their heads.

- Melanie Kraft fought waves of panic as she stood there, her fingers laced together on top of her brunette hair. She looked over at Mr. Clark; he was doing the same, but his eyes were a flurry of activity.

She whispered, "What should we do?"

Clark looked over to her. Before he said anything, the Chinese man said, "No talking!"

Melanie leaned back against the wall, felt a quiver in her legs.

The armed man divided his attention between the two of them and the front of the building.

Melanie regarded the gunman now, and she saw no feeling, no emotion. He spoke into his headset once or twice, but other than that he looked and acted almost like a robot.

Except his limp. It was clear that he was having trouble with one of his legs.

Now Melanie's terrified eyes darted back to John, hoping to see some sign that he had a plan. But she saw instead that he looked different; he had changed in the past few seconds, his face had reddened, and his eyes seemed to bulge in their sockets.

"John?"

"No talking!" the man said again, but Melanie was not paying attention to him. All her focus was on John Clark, because it was apparent that something was wrong.

His hands came off his head and his face grimaced in pain and he clutched his chest.

"Hand on head! Hand on head!"

Clark slowly lowered to his knees. His face was beet-red now; she could see purple veins in his forehead.

"Oh my God!" she said. "John, what's wrong?"

- The old man took a half-step back and put his hand out to the wall.

"Don't move!" said Grouse, and he lifted his Steyr TMP machine pistol up to the man as he steadied himself against the wall. Grouse saw the man's face was red, and he saw the girl looking on with concern.

The Divine Sword commando spun his weapon's barrel to the girl. "Don't move!" he repeated, principally because he did not know much English. But the dark-haired girl dropped to the floor next to the man, cradling him in her arms.

"John? John! What's wrong?"

The old gweilo put his hand to his chest.

"He's having a heart attack!" the girl said.

- Grouse called on his radio in Chinese: "Crane, this is Grouse. I think the old man is having a heart attack."

"Then let him die. I'll send someone down to get the girl and bring her up here. Crane out."

The white man was on his side on the tile floor, he was shaking and convulsing, his left arm was stuck out ramrod straight, and his right hand was pressed tightly against his heart.

Grouse pointed his gun at the girl.

"You move! Get up! Get back!" He knelt down slowly, the pain in his leg wound forcing him to adjust as he did so, and he grabbed her by her hair with his free hand. He started to pull her up and away from the dying old gweilo. He yanked her away, shoved her against the wall by the elevators, and then started to turn back to the man. As he did so, however, he felt an impact on his ankles, his feet flew out from under him, and he flipped backward. He crashed on his back on the tile floor right next to the white man, who no longer appeared to be dying.

The American's eyes were locked on him and intense with hate and purpose. The old man had used his legs to sweep Grouse off his feet, and now he had taken surprisingly strong hold of the Steyr's nylon sling, and he pulled it hard, and Grouse found himself pinned on his back on the cold tile floor. His finger had slipped out of the trigger guard of the weapon as his hand tried to break his fall, and as he scrambled on the tile, trying to free the sling from around his throat, he fought with the American for the grip of his gun.

The old man was fighting for it just as hard. He was alive and healthy and amazingly strong. The sling was around Grouse's neck, and the white man had it wrapped tightly around his wrist; every time Grouse tried to wrest control of the machine pistol, the sling was pulled to the side, yanking him off balance as he tried to sit up and take it.

Grouse looked to the stairwell, he tried to shout out for help, but the old man pulled the sling even tighter, partially cutting off his windpipe and turning the shout into just a warbling gurgle.

One more vicious yank to the left by the American and Grouse fell all the way onto his back and lost his grip on the gun. His hands reached out desperately for the weapon.

Grouse felt himself weakening as he flailed and kicked.

The American had control now.

- John Clark could not get his right hand inside the trigger of the gun because of his injury and limited mobility, but he had the sling perfectly positioned on the Chinese man's windpipe, so he cinched it tighter and tighter, strangling him to death.

When it was all over, some forty-five seconds after his feigned heart attack gave him the opening to fight back, he lay on his back panting next to the dead man for a few seconds.

But he knew he had no time to spare, so he sat up and went to work.

He felt quickly through the man's pockets and retrieved his SIG .45-caliber pistol and a mobile phone, and he pulled the headset off the man. He did not speak Mandarin, but he put the headset on, making certain the mute button was depressed so that his voice could not be heard.

Melanie just looked at him from across the floor. "He's dead?" she asked, still not catching up to what she had just witnessed.

"Yes."

She nodded. "You tricked him? You faked a heart attack?"

He nodded.

"I needed him closer. Sorry," Clark said as he hung the Steyr's sling over his neck.

"We have to call the police," she said.

"No time," said Clark. He looked the girl over quickly. Ryan had told Clark that Melanie had compromised him, apparently on the orders of a man she thought was an FBI agent. John was not sure who the young woman was working for or what her motivations were, but it seemed evident that this dead Chinese man on the floor was from the squad of assassins that had tried to kill her on the Rock Creek Parkway just hours earlier.

She was clearly not a confederate of theirs.

Clark had no idea how many more foreign killers there were in the building, nor how well armed and well trained they were, but if they were the group who took out the five CIA men in Georgetown, Clark was damn sure they were tier-one gunmen.

Clark did not trust Melanie Kraft, but he decided Melanie Kraft was the very least of his problems.

He held up his SIG pistol. "Do you know how to use this?"

She nodded slowly while she looked at it.

He handed it to her and she took it, then adopted a two-handed combat grip, holding the weapon at the low, ready in front of her at the waist.

"Listen carefully," Clark instructed. "I need you to stay behind me. Far behind, but don't lose sight of me."

"Okay," she said. "What are we going to do?"

"We're going upstairs."

John Clark kicked off his shoes and entered the darkened stairwell. As he did so, he heard a door opening just one floor above.