market.
The black market.
Money poured in here, for instance. Inside these walls, into this compound.
The owner of the mansion was coming home after sunset. His two cars drew up outside the front gate. A Volvo and a BMW. The BMW had tinted windows. The man in the guardhouse glanced at the cars, then pushed a button. The gate lurched into motion.
When it had opened all the way, the two cars entered. The gate glided closed.
The cars rolled slowly up the cobblestone drive toward the roundabout and the front door. After twenty seconds one of the Volvo’s front wheels hit something. Something that stuck up from the drive. A clank. The device had been planted right out in the open, disguised so that it looked like just another cobblestone. Very bold. It had been tripped. The driver of the Volvo felt it. It felt like he had driven full speed onto a road full of potholes or…maybe he’d run up against—
That was the end of the thought. The driver was blown up, straight up into the air, still in his seat. The hood of the car, flying.
The BMW slammed to a halt.
Three men sprang from the car: one from the front passenger seat, two from the back. Kicking open the doors, they jumped out, dispersing. One wore a shapka with the earflaps raised, the others were bareheaded and had crew cuts. The first wore a fur coat; the other two had on expensive dark suits. Neither the coat nor the suit jackets were buttoned. They never were. The men had their hands thrust under their lapels. The fur coat took out a submachine gun, the suits whipped their pistols from their holsters, and they stood still, ready to fire.
Two men tumbled out of the Volvo’s unexploded back seat, alive. Bloody, screaming. They crawled away from the car.
The BMW’s driver seemed to have come to his senses, because all of a sudden he threw the car into reverse. He had to get the hell out of here, to get his boss, sitting there in the back seat, in the middle, away from this vision of hell in the mansion’s front garden.
Suddenly, all the lights in the building crashed.
As if a fuse had blown. The building, visible a second ago, was gone.
There had been a small pop inside, but it wasn’t audible out front.
The darkness unnerved the men even more.
One of the men from the BMW broke into a run, though he had no idea whom he ought to be attacking. It was just a reflex. He jumped off the drive, zigzagging as he ran, heading for the porch, searching for an assailant. His left foot felt something. He had been a wrestler and had an impressive physique—that’s how he ended up in this job, working as a bodyguard. Shit, it’s a feint, he thought, recalling the single worst blunder he had made as a wrestler. His hair stood on end. Just then, his left ankle was pulling the wire. About ten centimeters above the ground. A booby trap. The wire had tripped it. Something flew at him from one side. Searing pain.
Not just in one place. Everywhere on his body.
The submachine gun in his hand fired at random, senselessly, as his muscles contracted. He was in agony. An agonizing death.
One of the men crawling on the driveway took a bullet.
The BMW reached the gate, backward. The driver lowered his window, yelled at the guard, “Open up! Open the fuck up!” But the guard didn’t answer. He was prostrate on the floor of the guardhouse. A line drawn across his throat.
One clean horizontal line.
It looked to the driver as if the guard wasn’t there. He considered getting out and opening the gate himself, but at the sound of gunfire he instinctively hit the gas. He rammed the bumper back into the gate, then shifted gears and screeched forward.
The lamps illuminating the garden were going out now, one after another. Each time one went out, there was a crash. Somehow they were being smashed. The rest of the compound joined the mansion in its darkened invisibility. There was hardly light at all, anywhere.
A single, precise gunshot.
A second.
A third. A fourth…a seventh.
The sound of a new magazine snapping into place. Someone tossing aside the old magazine, even though it still had a few bullets left, swapping it out for another. A fresh, full cartridge. The BMW swerved wildly, searching for a way out. The gunman watched the car go, then sprang into action. He was fast,