He pressed the button and a dull whumph sound accompanied the crash of shattered glass as the lab's window blew out above his head.

Before the glass had fallen to the ground, Helman was running around the corner of the building and up the main stairs, pushing startled students out of his way.

He charged up the stairwells, using the old style pin locks to jam the fire doors on each floor. At the third floor he pulled down a red fire alarm panel. The glass rod snapped and a strident ringing echoed through the halls. Students and staff on the main floor milled about, uncertain if the fire signal were a test or the real thing. But on the third floor, where Helman saw the explosion had blown the lab's fire door off its hinges, there was panic. He was unseen as he moved against the crowd of escaping students. Smoke filled the devastated lab. Flickers from a handful of small fires lit it eerily. Helman held the end of his scarf to his nose and mouth, slid the machete from the sheath strapped against his chest, and entered in to fulfil his contract.

A draft was created between the shattered window and the open door. The smoke swirled out like a mist clearing from a dark hidden valley. Helman saw a blood-soaked form crumpled against the base of a cabinet unit.

The unit was crushed. The shrapnel from the exploding gas cylinders had been devastating.

Helman held the machete ready to strike, and turned the body over. A jagged section of cylinder metal was imbedded in a flattened hollow in the forehead. The face was covered in blood and small solid particles sprayed out from the skull, it was the doctor. Beside him, his glasses were unbroken.

Helman lowered the machete, stood and turned to examine the room for the woman's body. Part of him continued counting off the seconds. The bodyguards from the car across the street would be breaking down the first floor fire doors to the stairwells by now. He had a minute at most.

A cold swell of wind billowed the smoke in front of the window and carried it out the door. There was a moment of clearing in the far corner of the lab, well lit with the growing intensity of the fires. A bulky refrigeration unit appeared untouched by the blast. And then he saw her.

Impossibly, she was alive. Her clothes hung in tattered remnants, exposing pale, unmarked, undamaged flesh. Her hair was scorched. Part of her scalp was bald. But she lived, untouched by the deadly, explosive spray of metal fragments. She lives!

Helman froze. The impossibility of it screamed in his mind. The smoke and fire and destruction around him, the sound of far away sirens, all collapsed in on themselves, shrinking away to nothingness beneath the awesome reality of what he saw. She lived. And she saw him. And she was coming at him.

Her hands were like claws, arched and deadly. Her face was twisted into animalistic fury. A high pitched whine came from deep within her. She lived, and she was attacking.

Bent over, looking as if she were preparing to jump the fifteen feet to where Helman stood, she picked her way through the rubble toward him.

Every warning given him by Rice and his people rushed through Helman's mind. He stepped back, slowly, judging the distances between the woman and himself and the doorway. He held the machete before him and reached carefully inside his coat for his magnum.

Out in the corridor, he heard-the crash of the firedoor being forced open. Then shouts. Then gunfire. People were shooting at each other outside the lab. The woman stopped her advance, still whining in ragged breaths, and looked toward the door. Helman drew the magnum, but held his fire. If he killed her now, with hostiles so close, he might not have a chance to get her head.

A sudden flash of motion shot through the open doorway. An arrow appeared, imbedded in the wall near Helman.

Who was outside the door?

The woman jerked her head as though she had seen the arrow in flight and followed its flight. Her whining stopped. She spun, ran to the window, and was gone, down into the night.

Helman felt he was in a dream. Nothing made sense. More shots echoed in the corridor. He ran to the window, hoping to follow the woman's escape route.

There was nothing outside the window to hold on to. No ledges, no outthrust bricks. And there was no body on the ground below. Adrienne St. Clair had vanished.

A man dressed in black appeared in the doorway to the corridor. He carried a crossbow. It was aimed at Helman.

Helman turned at the sound of the gunshots that ripped through the man's body. The crossbow released its bolt into the wall as the man spun around and collapsed.

Without knowing the reasons, Helman realised two groups, somehow connected to St. Clair, were battling outside the ruined lab. If the one side was using only crossbows against gunfire, it was only a matter of time before the other side achieved dominance of the corridor and the lab.

Helman ran to the hole he had started in the wall near the welding tanks. It was larger. The walls were made of drywall over soft fibres insulating blocks. The blocks had splintered, absorbing most of the blast force. They were held up only by the warped drywell on the other side. Helman knew the room on that side of the lab had been locked after five on the night of his reconnaissance. He would have to risk that it hadn't yet been taken over. With three lacks he had enlarged the hole. There was nothing but darkness on the other side. He squeezed through.

The door was still secure. Inside the next room, he slid a filing cabinet in front of the hole to obscure it from the other side. He had to do everything he could to buy time.

Now the sirens were coming from directly outside. Firetrucks had arrived. The fighting in the hall seemed to be over. Helman crouched in a corner behind a desk and kept his gun trained on the doorway. He would not risk stepping out into the hall. His plan was to stay in position and try to walk out as the building was opened in the morning. He heard firefighters running through the corridor outside and the hollow whoosh of chemical fire extinguishers from the lab. It seemed unusual that he could hear no shouts about finding a body.

There was a loud noise from the door to the room Helman hid in. The doorknob dropped off. Helman aimed at where a man's chest would be. The door swung open.

A firefighter in a rubber coat and respirator, carrying an axe, paused in the doorway. Helman held his fire. The firefighter ran a rubber-gloved hand over the wall by the doorframe until he found the light switch. The blue fluorescents flickered on; their power lines hadn't been severed. Helman crouched lower. The firefighter walked over to the wall shared with the lab and began examining it. He started pushing at the filing cabinet.

Helman got up quickly and quietly and swung the door shut. Then he flicked off the lights. The firefighter looked up at the light fixtures then slumped onto the floor. Helman had connected with rigid fingers behind the man's jawbone.

Outfitted in the firefighter's equipment and protective clothing, respirator mask in place, Helman went into the corridor.

Another firefighter down the hall yelled, "Hey, Gerry, is that room secure?"

Helman nodded and made a thumbs-up sign. He continued down the opposite end of the corridor. There were several other firefighters wandering into the blownout lab, but there was no body in the hall. Whoever had been shooting it out a few minutes before were efficient as well as deadly.

Helman walked out of the building through a back parking lot exit. There appeared to be no surveillance. In deep shadow, he removed the firefighter's gear, and cut through three adjacent parking lots before emerging onto the street.

Nothing seemed unusual.

He walked to the building several blocks away where he had hidden his bus station locker key. It was still buried in the frozen dirt of a raised concrete flower bed in front. He took a cab to the bus station and retrieved his wallet and identification. He wouldn't risk returning to the hotel and Mr. Rice until he had a more definite story to tell him. He did not want to confront Rice's temper with the idea that the woman he was supposed to kill didn't seem to be human.

She had probably been protected behind the refrigeration unit that had been in the lab. Regardless, Helman knew she couldn't get far without clothing on a cold night. She had only one place to go, and he was going to meet her there.

He waved down another cab. The night was not yet over.

Fourteen.

There was no such thing as coincidence. Helman slipped the slim, easily concealed form of the .44 Bulldog into his hand the moment he saw that the four street lamps closest to Leung's townhouse had been extinguished.

Somewhere on that street was someone who wanted the cover of darkness.

The cab that had let Helman off passed by him as he stood of the corner of Leung's street. It continued along the residential street to cut back onto a major road. As it rounded the bend its headlights shone onto the front of the townhouse. The door was open. There were no lights on. Either the woman had returned or the house had been penetrated by the groups from the lab.

Helman crouched over and ran up to the front of a house fifteen doors down from the townhouse. He knelt in the dark cedar bushes, observing. The cable television and phone company truck were still in position. He had assumed the day before that they were bodyguards. Now he could not be certain. But he did know that they were somehow connected to St. Clair.

He ran silently across two front lawns and pressed closely against a stone porch. The street was still. The only sound came from a radio being played too loudly through an open window. A glint of light from the phone truck attracted his eye. He looked off to the side of it, letting the more light-sensitive areas of his eyes concentrate on the obscured details. The glint was a reflection from a streetlamp down by the corner. It was caught by a jagged piece of glass hanging from the truck's windshield. It was almost totally blown out. All of the glass in the driver's section was smashed. Helman looked over to the cable TV van across the street. It's windows were intact. One group had won.

Helman moved through the shadows to the closest house to Leung's to have a streetlamp in front of it. Nothing had moved or made noise in the direction of the townhouse. The radio playing through an open window stopped abruptly. Helman turned to the absence of noise. The light in the room went out. He could see a figure come to stand in front of the window. There was a tinkle of glass down by the far corner of the street. Another streetlamp was extinguished. Helman had heard no shot. The guns in the night were silenced.

Suddenly light from the porch lamp flooded over him. The porch door opened. A man in his early twenties, the look of a student about him, peered out at the unilluminated street. Helman dropped closer to the ground, the protection of the shadows gone. The man saw the movement.

"Hey, what the hell's going on?" The man leaned over the porch railing, looking directly at Helman. Helman's response was swift. He had to rescue his position. Control the situation. He shot his hand out, flipping open the wallet from his jacket pocket. It opened randomly on a credit card. His other hand was just as fast. It held his gun..

"Police. Get down. Get the light off. There's a sniper."

The man saw the gun, ignored the wallet. The misdirection had worked.

Then, incredibly to Helman, the young man turned to look for the sniper. Helman shouted to him again and an arrow tore out of the night.

The barbs caught in the soft flesh of the student's right cheek, splitting his face open and ripping the skin back to his ear. The arrow splintered against the bricks by the porch door. In an instant the man was down, clawing madly at the open wound of his face, his screams turned liquid by the blood filling his mouth.

Helman shot out the light above the door and rolled away from the porch. A flight of arrows rushed above him, sparking against the bricks and clattering down around the writhing figure.

A woman came running to the door and stopped in a moment of horror as she saw what lay on the porch. She crouched and pushed the door open for the wounded man to drag himself through.

Helman detected motion in the bushes of a house across the street. More glass clinked softly in the distance. There was one streetlamp left on the street. Soon the night would be impenetrable, except for the soft city light glow of the low clouds. Helman rolled off the front lawn onto the driveway which ran beside the house, stopping as he turned the corner. He held his gun ready, pointed straight up by his head, and took five deep, measured breaths. Then he spun out from behind the corner, swinging his gun to waist level. The man with the crossbow was two feet away. Helman saw his face, young and frightened in the muzzle flashes of his gun. The man was down instantly, one leg twitching by the unfired crossbow at his side.

Helman moved back behind the corner. The police must arrive at any second. They would provide the confusion for Helman's escape when it became necessary. He rejected the option of immediate retreat and pushed on through the backyards in the direction of the townhouse.

Two houses from the townhouse block, he inched his way along a side wall so he could observe the street again.

Nothing visible had changed. He could not see the watchers he knew must be there, but he knew they would see him if he attempted the seventy-foot run to the open townhouse door. He decided to wait for the others, the mysterious others armed with crossbows, to show themselves. The first mistake would be theirs.

Five minutes passed and Helman decided the police were not going to arrive. Whomever he faced, the influence they wielded was respectable. Then he realised, Rice would have that influence; Rice and King and New York. Had they controlled the situation to enable Helman to fulfil his contract? Could he simply walk across the front lawns of the townhouses and go after St. Clair, protected by the power of New York? His mind raced with the details. Had he ever been actually threatened? Or had he simply been too close to attacks on others, as he had been to the man on the porch?

Helman reviewed. There were two forces: the group with guns, the group with crossbows. Which were the bodyguards? In the lab, the woman had stopped her advance at the sound of the gunfire in the halls. But she had fled when the arrow appeared in the wall. A threat or a signal? The key had to be the crossbows. Anachronistic. Like decapitation. They were part of some ritual method of killing. Rice had gone for a 'sweep'.

Helman was not the only assassin contracted. Other assassins from New York hid in the shadows. Helman had killed one of them. The people with guns must be her bodyguards. But the risks were still too great. Helman stayed close to the wall. One of the other assassins could try the run to the townhouse door. Helman would wait There was movement in the backyard of the next house. Gun or crossbow, Helman was exposed against the side wall. He held his gun ready. He would try an alliance with the crossbows. He would try to outshoot the guns.

"King," he whispered to the unseen presence in the yard. "Out of New York."

The movement stopped. A long silence followed. Was he drawing aim, or considering? Then a whisper came back.

"Nevada."

Did it mean there were other meetings? Other places? Helman held his fire. He whispered back, "Nevada."

More movement. The figure emerged from the deep black of night shadows. He carried a gun aimed straight at Helman.

Helman slid slowly over from his own protective darkness. The glowing clouds lent a hazy half-light to the driveway between the two houses. To eyes accustomed to the dark, it was enough for recognition. The figure smiled.

"We've been looking for you, Phoenix." The figure kept his gun trained on Helman. Helman stayed silent. He had no idea who Phoenix might be, but if the confusion of the man with the gun was keeping him alive now, he wanted to do nothing to dissuade the man.

The man spoke again, gesturing with his head, being careful not to let his gun deviate from its killing aim.

"Listen, Phoenix, we can cut the suspense and waste each other right now, or we can hang around like this for another minute or so and let the Jesuits do it for us. Or we can get back there and meet with Marker One." He nodded back towards the pitch black backyard.

Helman heard the names, but none of them registered. Phoenix. Jesuits. Marker One. All code names he assumed.

Nothing.

The man was becoming impatient. His eyes kept darting nervously towards the street. "Come on, Phoenix. We know all about you. Marker One wants you. For a few questions. We'll pay you off just as well as the Mounties or Langley or anyone. And then well help you out of here."

'Langley' registered. Someone had confused him with a CIA operative. Helman thought he had spotted the first mistake. He moved on it. "Tell Marker One to put questions through Langley. I can't be interfered with."

The figure's brow knotted. "There's no time for Langley. Jesus, Phoenix. We'll admit it. Anything you want.

Anything Langley wants. We shouldn't have sent our man after you yesterday. It was unfortunate, but understandable. Langley didn't brief us. We're not going to try anything like that again. You work for Langley, you're golden. Okay? Now if we don't move, one of the Jesuit's arrows is really going to start interfering with you."

Shadows moved across the street. The nervous man saw them. Helman willed himself not to follow the man's gaze.

Now was not the time to fall for a trick from the movies. He had to know where his charade would take him.

The man's gun wavered between Helman and the street. "They're coming, Phoenix. Jesus, let's-" He jerked around sideways. An arrow hung limply from his coat. He fired blindly towards the street.

Helman looked down the driveway. Three, now four, five shadows with crossbows were converging on him. More arrows hit the man who had questioned him. Some hung from his clothing. Others bounced off him to the ground.

The gunfire was silenced, and only muffled whispers of rushing air were heard above the clatter of the advancing archers. The man's gun clicked empty. He turned to Helman, desperation coloured his voice. "For God's sake, help-"

An arrow took him in the throat, jerking his head over like a hanged man. He crumpled against the opposite side wall. Two figures had been dropped by the dead man's firing. Three still advanced.

Helman stayed close to the wall and aimed carefully. An arrow sparked above him off the bricks. He fired. His silenced weapon spitting harshly in the narrow space between the houses. He saw the closest attacker stumble. He drew aim on the next. Another hit. The third also. But the first had gotten up and he continued, crossbow coming up, aiming at Helman.

Helman fired twice more. The first attacker slumped forward and was finally still. The two others, also hit, came on.

He pulled the trigger. There was no recoil. The gun was empty. The archers, clutching at the wounds Helman knew they must have, drew closer. Mortally wounded, they would not stop until they had reached their target.

Helman rumbled in his jacket for his Magnum. But it was too late. The closer one had dropped to his knees and was lifting his weapon twenty feet from Helman.

Then the archer was lifted into the air by a blinding stream of white as explosion after explosion burst off the brick walls. Helman felt the echoes sting through his shoes and clothes. The smell of cordite was strong and thin blue smoke was illuminated in the flashes of the automatic rifles fired by the two men who had appeared at the back end of the driveway.

The attacker farther away had begun to fall when the first volley hit him, pushing him back up and making him twitch like a crazed dancer down the length of the driveway where he finally toppled over and settled in a formless heap.

Then there was silence. One of the men with rifles walked over to the body of the man who had talked with Helman. The other walked toward Helman.

"You hit?" he asked.

Helman shook his head. He couldn't hear what the man had said but could understand the movements of his mouth. The echoes of the gunfire still rang in his ears.

The man held out his hand to Helman. "Let's go down to Marker One. I think this was the last of them."

Helman stood up on his own. He had seen arrows bounce off a man. Others with crossbows had walked into gunfire, and had continued. A wave of desperation threatened him. None of the rules was working. He fought it, and walked in front of the man who had offered to help him, the man's weapon pointed at his back.

As he passed the body of the second archer a blood-soaked hand stretched out, grabbing him. Helman froze. Half the man's body had been blasted away, yet he moved, he talked. At least his mouth was moving. Helman heard a voice, but it was far away, buried amongst the explosions. It did not sound like English.

The man with the rifle saw what had happened. He said something to Helman. Helman shook his head and pointed to his ear. The man yelled louder. "Confession. He wants a final Confession. The Last Rites." Then Helman placed the language. The torn apart body which clutched him in an iron grip, was speaking in Latin. Half his guts spread out over a frozen driveway and he would not let go until he had had Confession. Helman knew then what kind of men they were with the crossbows. Fanatics. The intensity of it was terrifying.

The man with the rifle knelt in front of the dying archer who gripped Helman's foot. He whispered into the man's blood-drenched ear. Helman could not be sure, but it too sounded like Latin. The dying man talked in gasps, pink foam frothed at the corner of his mouth. Helman knelt, struggling to hear anything at all that might help him. He leaned close to the man. Some words did break through. They were all meaningless.

Then the dying man opened his eyes. For a moment, things had cleared for him. He stared at the face of the man he had thought to be his confessor, and tears began to form in his eyes as he realised the hoax that had been played on him. Then his eyes turned to Helman and the face changed immediately. Hatred took over and the one bloody hand on Helman's foot and the bullet blasted finger stumps of his other hand rose up like pythons and constricted themselves around Helman's throat.

Helman's eyes bulged. It was unbelievable. The strength, the hatred, were staggering. The dying man was going to win. And then Helman saw the man's face disintegrate as the man with the rifle fired into the side of his head. For an instant, the seething eyes glowed, back lit by the bullet's explosion. Then the face collapsed. The image of those eyes burned into Helman as the rigid fingers slowly fell away from his neck.

Helman knelt for a moment longer. Rubbing his neck. Catching his breath. Trying to conceive what could cause the maniacal fanaticism necessary for such determination. Then he saw it. Like a shining clear pool in the dark blood that thickened around the neck of the dead man. He was wearing a cleric's collar. Helman struggled to his feet. The men with rifles gave him room. Helman turned over the body of another dead attacker. He wore a collar also.

Five-bodies lay torn and steaming in the frozen night air. He checked them all. All of them in black with the patch of white at their throats. Madness lay about him.