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good in my lap. As the wipers smeared the water on the windshield, I got the SUV going and turned it around.
    The guy in the ghillie suit looked like a small brush pile in the lawn.
    I put the transmission in park, leaped out, and ran over to him. I turned his head and took a good look. Nope. Never saw him before. And he had an MP-5 lying beside him. I had forgotten about it. Hell, I could have left the other one in the house and just taken his.
    His weapon sported a double banana clip in it that might come in handy later, so I jerked it out. I left the weapon.
    “Where did you get your submachine gun?” she asked, her eyes on my face.
    “The guy carrying it left it to me in his will.”
    She glanced back at the house, then at the suitcase on the rear seat.
    As we were going down the drive, I asked Kelly, “What happened back there?”
    “They came this morning. I was upstairs, heard the shooting, went to the top of the stairs. There’s a place where you can look over the balcony into the main room downstairs, and I saw they had shot Mikhail. That’s when I grabbed the suitcase in his room and hid.”
    “Who is Mikhail? What’s in the suitcase?”
    She took a deep breath before she answered. “Mikhail Goncharov was the chief archivist for SVR, the successor to the KGB. He was like . . . their librarian, in charge of the central records depository. He defected last week. We had just started to debrief him. He spent the last twenty years making notes from the case files of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, and then Russia’s after the breakup. He had seven suitcases full of notes that he brought with him when we extracted him.”
    She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “That’s the last one.”
    ***
    He knew his wife was probably dead. He had heard the ripping of the silenced submachine guns—still loud —and knew precisely what it was. She had been in the kitchen eating when he came into the bathroom, just moments ago.
    He held his hands to his ears, trying to stop the sounds. Oh, God, all his nightmares were becoming reality!
    He was completely unarmed, knew nothing of unarmed combat, knew it would be suicide to leave the bathroom. As the staccato bursts sounded closer, he surveyed the small room. There was a chute for towels … he opened it, wormed his way into it. And fell.
    He landed in a pile of towels and sheets on a hard concrete floor. The basement.
    He looked around, desperate for a place to hide. Oversized laundry machines were mounted against the wall—two washers, two dryers.
    He had always had the ability to think quickly and function flawlessly under pressure; he had been doing it for twenty-five years under the noses of the paranoid professionals of the KGB. He used that ability now. Without wasting a second, he opened a dryer and crawled in amid the sheets and pillowcases, then pulled the door shut after him.
    With the house on fire, the man hiding in the washing machine in the basement decided he could wait no longer. He could smell the smoke, hear the roar of the fire, and knew if he waited much longer, he would never get out of the building.
    Perhaps he had already waited too long . . .
    The basement had not yet filled with smoke. There had to be an exit door . . . somewhere! He ran from room to room, fighting back the panic. There was a furnace in one room, several storerooms full of canned food and large freezers . . . and at the end of the hallway, a door.
    It was locked with a massive dead bolt, one that could be opened from the inside. The man opened it, and found himself in a stairwell. He went up it slowly, trying to see, as the fire raged in the house above him.
    No one in sight. Scraggly grass covered with autumn leaves for forty yards, then the forest.
    The man ran toward the forest.
    Safely behind a large tree, he paused and looked back at the house, which was engulfed in flames.
    The blood pounded in his temples.
    Biting his lip, trying to contain his emotions, he turned