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deck and covered his head with both arms.
    The Koreans returned fire.
    Chaos erupted with so much noise that it was impossible to distinguish one sound from another. Bullets struck the rooftop and dislodged bits of concrete, but most of them flew by at a safe height. After a few seconds Peter pulled the gun from the small of his back and raised his head to check out the scene.
    One of the Korean muscle twins was bleeding from his left arm, but still firing steadily from the cover of the western stairwell, while the other dragged his fallen boss around the back. Blondie had thrown himself down on his belly with the precious case under his chest, and was shooting wildly every which way.
    Peter eyed the door to his eastern exit, wondering where the guy who’d been standing there had gone. He was about to make a run for it when his question was answered by a hand gripping the back of his shirt, and then hauling him forcefully around the back of the stairwell.
    It was pretty much the only serious cover. All five of the angry Chechens were crammed there together, in the narrow strip that separated the structure from the spindly railing on the edge of the roof. Taking turns leaning around the corner and shooting at the Koreans, they were having some kind of unfathomable argument in Chechen, which Peter didn’t understand at all.
    What he did understand was that he was stuck on the wrong side of the stairwell—the side that didn’t have a door. He needed to get the Chechens to cover him, while he made a run for the door. Otherwise he’d get plugged the second he stuck his head out.
    But his brain was spinning, coming up blank, again and again.
    He had to think.
    Think!
    Die Hard jokes notwithstanding, Peter wasn’t an action hero. He knew how to use a gun, but he was an average shot under the best of circumstances. He wasn’t particularly brave. Reckless, yes, but not because of courage.
    He really wasn’t a bad ass.
    But he was good at manipulation. That was his super power. The ability to think on his feet, and talk his way out of any situation. Not that it was doing him much good.
    Think, Peter!
    Suddenly, it hit him. He knew exactly what he needed to say, and was retrieving the proper Russian translation from his adrenaline-addled brain when one of the boys took a bullet in the shoulder and reeled backward, spinning and slamming into him.
    Peter let out an involuntary shout and fell into one of the slender railings that stood between him and the deadly thirty-story drop to the hot Bangkok street below. Unsurprisingly, the half-assed railing bent backward under his weight, and his feet slipped into the narrow gap between the railing and the edge of the roof.
    He dropped Jaruk’s gun and flailed for balance as both his legs followed his feet. He was narrowly saved from falling to his death by a flat metal post, which wedged between his legs and slammed into his junk, preventing the rest of his body from slipping through.
    Bolts of pain shot through him.
    Never in his life had he been so happy to be hit in the nuts.
    The awkward fall left him balanced like a witch on a broomstick. Instead of its usual vertical position, the post was sticking horizontally off the edge of the roof at a 90-degree angle. It had been attached to the roof with four bolts, three of which had been torn loose by Peter’s weight. The only thing holding him up was that one bolt and the two flimsy wires connecting the bent post to its wobbly neighbors.
    Below his dangling feet lay the teeming nighttime city.
    Concentrating on breathing through the nauseating pain and trying to recover enough to climb back up onto the roof, he forgot for a crucial moment what a bad idea it would be to look down.
    He looked down.
    Vertigo slammed into him harder than the wounded Chechen, and he swallowed an airless, terrified gasp, grasping frantically for the post. He could see dozens of tiny motorbikes and taxis flowing like glowing corpuscles along Wireless Road, far