The smoke was still thick when the shooting started.White haze rolled through the aisles of the warehouse, clinging to the shelves in pale drifts, and somewhere inside it, a second figure moved. Soren caught the muzzle flash before he caught anything else, two bursts of orange light cutting through the murk, and he was already moving, dropping low and shifting his position as the rounds punched through cardboard boxes and sent splinters of wood spinning into the air.He returned fire. Controlled, deliberate, sweeping the barrel toward the sound of the shots. The bullets chewed through shelving and packaging, and neither of them hit anything that mattered.Then both guns ran dry at the same moment.The double click of empty chambers rang out in the sudden silence, two hollow sounds nearly identical, nearly simultaneous. Soren ejected his spent magazine without thinking, his hand already moving to the fresh one at his hip. He seated it, reached for the slide relea

The second floor of Briarwood Clinic, 263 Drake Street, London.Mason worked without rushing. He swabbed the forceps with antiseptic, laid out the gauze and bandage roll within easy reach, and glanced over at Soren, who had taken off his shirt and was lying flat on the narrow cot with the particular stillness of someone managing serious pain."If it hurts," Mason said, "keep it down. Neighbors on both sides, and they don't need the excitement.""I'll manage," Soren said."Sure you will." Mason pulled the stool close and bent over the wound. "Don't see many people take a bullet and still move around like that. I'll give you that much."He inserted the forceps. The entry channel was shallow, which told him something, and a few seconds of careful probing confirmed it. The slug came out misshapen, its nose flattened and its jacket partially stripped, the kind of deformation that happened when a round hit something solid before it hit flesh.Mason held it up

Paul Mans had always considered himself a man of a certain caliber.He'd spent twenty years building the Mans Crew from a handful of street-level enforcers into an organization that controlled six blocks of prime London territory, collected tribute from every business on Drake Street, and commanded enough respect that even the local police preferred to negotiate rather than provoke. He dressed well. He read widely. He had seen every film in The Godfather series no fewer than four times each, and he modeled his bearing accordingly: calm under pressure, deliberate in speech, never the first to show fear.He was showing fear now.The gunfire in the corridor had stopped several minutes ago. That was the problem. His men had gone in loud and confident, and then the shooting had tapered off, and then there had been silence, and not one of them had come back to report. Paul sat on the sofa in the main room with his hands resting on his knees and watched the sweat from his fo

The voice coming through the phone was beyond furious."Paul Mans, I trusted you, and you send someone to kill me? My ex-wife is your sister, you piece of..." The rest dissolved into something that couldn't be printed in any language, a sustained, inventive stream of profanity that said everything about the state of Philip's composure and nothing useful about the tactical situation.Paul was lying flat across the driver's seat with the phone held at arm's length, his cheek pressed against the center console, waiting it out. He had learned long ago that the only productive response to Philip in this particular register was silence. When he heard the breathing on the other end finally hitch, he brought the phone back to his ear."Philip," he said quietly, "this man is not someone you want to fight. Tell your people to put their weapons down."A pause that lasted exactly one second. "What did you just say to me? What kind of a thing is that to say? You absolute..."<

The security door swung open with a heavy clunk, and the fluorescent lights came on in sequence, one bank after another, flooding the room with clean white light.The walls were covered in weapons.Long guns on horizontal mounts, arranged by type and caliber, running the full length of both sides of the room. Two rows of glass-fronted cabinets down the center held handguns, revolvers making up the majority, and the brand variety was comprehensive enough to cover most of what the legitimate market produced and a fair amount of what it didn't. If there was a manufacturer with a meaningful market share anywhere in the world, something bearing their name was probably in this room.Philip walked in ahead of Soren and seemed to recover a degree of his professional composure simply by being in the space. He turned, gestured at the inventory around him, and said, "Would you like me to walk you through what we have?"Soren scanned the room once, then handed him the list.<