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find the target through his burning pupils, but he was happy to see the masked man lying dead on his back on the floor.
    Dom knew he had to get upstairs to help Arik, and he also knew he needed a loaded firearm to do it, so he started to kneel down to take the Uzi from the dead man, but just as he did so, another man burst through the kitchen door.
    This man wore no mask, he was clean-shaven, young, and he looked wild-eyed and terrified. But he was close, contact distance to Caruso, who was kneeling with his back against the kitchen counter.
    Caruso rose and punched the man in the midsection with his empty hand, and his fist slammed into a surprising hardness there. It felt like the intruder was wearing a chest rig of ammunition for a rifle under his jacket, presumably as a way to keep it hidden from view.
    Dom punched again with his other fist, but he didn’t make the same mistake twice. This time he went for the young man’s face, striking him in the jaw and knocking him back onto the island in the center of the little kitchen.
    Dom knelt quickly, scooped up the Uzi, and fired a single round into the forehead of the man lying on the island. The machine pistol barked in his hand and the room lit with the flash, then all was dark and silent again. He started to run for the hallway to the staircase, but he stopped himself, turned, and looked back at the dead man.
    It only now just registered. This man had carried no weapon, but he’d worn something heavy and solid on his chest.
    Why the hell would he have a chest rack full of Uzi mags if he didn’t have an Uzi?
    Dom rushed back to the body, ripped open the zipped windbreaker, and then backed away suddenly, slamming his hips into the kitchen counter behind him.
    In front of him in the dim light lay a dead man wearing a suicide vest. Long, fat rows of explosives had been stitched into gray canvas. Loose wires crisscrossed the entire apparatus.
    A gasp passed Caruso’s lips. “Arik.”
    W HILE DOMINIC HAD BEEN fighting for his life downstairs, Arik Yacoby had been doing exactly the same in the upstairs hallway. The man who’d jumped him from behind was now dead, his neck, jaw, and skull a wreck of shattered bones. Yacoby was hurt, too, his lips and nose dripped blood, but he pushed away the pain and exertion of the fight in the tight
    space, and he felt around to find the Uzi in the dark. He grabbed it with his left hand.
    Behind him, his wife screamed in Hebrew. “Arik! Neshek! ” Gun!
    Yacoby dove to the floor of the hallway, spinning as he dropped, and he landed on his back as a burst of fire from his bedroom sent supersonic lead up the hall in his direction. The rounds went over him, he was flat on his back holding the tiny machine pistol pointed between his bare feet and up the hall. He focused on the flash and, careful to fire only aimed semiautomatic rounds from the fully automatic weapon to avoid hitting his family, he shot at the light.
    He felt his own Uzi being ripped out of his hands, and realized a round from the gunman up the hall had struck his weapon and knocked it away, probably damaging it as well. But the gunfire from his bedroom ceased and, through the ringing in his ears, Arik thought he heard the unmistakable sound of a micro-Uzi hitting and bouncing on the wooden floor.
    Below him, he heard ferocious fighting. A long spray of automatic rounds, the cries of a man and the crash of bodies, but his mind was on his bedroom and what he would find there.
    He leapt to his feet and ran for his family.
    D OMINIC C ARUSO SPRINTED INTO the living room, heading for the stairs. As he passed the open front door he looked to the ground, expecting to see the first man he’d taken down in the engagement with the thrown paring knife. But the ground in front of the door was empty. Caruso spun into the stairwell, hoping against hope the man with the knife in his chest was not now heading upstairs, and wearing a suicide vest.
    The stairwell was clear. Dom began taking