The CIA taught me everything they knew then, but they didn’t teach me everything I know now.

If the Albanian driver tries to counter my PIT, he’ll fail, and he’ll wreck out just the same.

“C’mon, Gentry,” I repeat. “You got this.”

I can hear the Albanians shouting at one another through the earpiece; they are anxious and frantic, probably because they now notice that the car trailing behind them is coming up their ass. On the right side of me, a row of large houses is all but hidden behind stone walls and heavy foliage, and on the left it’s mostly just trees, with the sea beyond. There’s a wide sidewalk running along next to the road here, making the space for me to work in a little bit larger than just a two-lane road.

This isn’t the perfect place for a PIT, but it’s the best I’m going to get. I decide to go for it, and I move into the left lane as if I’m about to pass.

The driver isn’t an idiot; he knows the headlights that came racing up from behind at two thirty a.m. are attached to a vehicle that poses a threat. He jerks his wheel violently to the left, squeezing me out.

Shit.

I slow a little, fake an attempt to approach on the right, and the van bites on this. He pulls hard to the right, and I think I’ve got an opportunity to get back to his left, but right then gunfire booms out of the van’s rear window, and instantly my windshield spiderwebs.

These fuckers aren’t messing around.

“Put your head down now, Talyssa, and keep it there!”

I’ve got to make this happen before one of their rounds hits me in the fucking forehead, so I accelerate till the nose of my four-door is just past the left rear bumper of the van.

Then I carefully turn the wheel to the right, nudging in.

I make contact; it’s not much, but it’s sufficient, because it pops the rear end of the van to the right just enough to cause the tires to lose traction and the driver to lose control of the vehicle. The nose of the van veers sharply to the left, and I keep my rightward steer going, even after I’ve broken contact, so I can get out of the way of what’s about to happen.

What happens is a lot more violent than I’d hoped for, considering my aim here was to protect one of the people inside the van. The big top-heavy vehicle turns ninety degrees to the road on squealing and smoking tires, and immediately tips over at speed. As I slam on my brakes I look in my driver-side mirror and see the black van crash onto its right side. The rear door flies open with the impact, and a body ejects onto the street.

I can’t tell if it’s male or female.

Poor Talyssa, I think. First, I came slamming down from the sky, knocking her to the cobblestones in a pile of men, and now I’ve wrecked her out in a brutal crash.

I’m leaping out of the Vauxhall before the last of the debris from the crash has even rained back to Earth. Drawing my pistol, I actuate my weapon light under the barrel, shining it on the scene.

The person ejected is a man; he doesn’t look as badly injured as I expected him to be, but I fix that immediately by firing twice into his right side as he tries to rise to his feet.

He spins away from me and ends up dead on his back in the street, arms and legs splayed.

I move around to the front of the vehicle, look through the cracked windshield, and see the driver and the man in the front passenger seat lying on top of each other. They are moving, but I don’t fire, because I can’t see Talyssa. She might be on the wall of the van behind them, so I run around to the back, crouch down, and enter there.

My light reflects off the dust and smoke in the air, but through it all I see an arm wildly waving a stainless semiauto pistol my way. The gun snaps, earth-shattering in the small space, and I return fire into the face of the figure holding it, unsure whether I’ve been shot. I don’t feel any impact, but I keep firing till the stainless steel pistol falls away. Only when it does so do I see that this is one of the bearded men; he’s lying on top of Talyssa in the second row. She is screaming bloody murder, thank God, and now that I know where she is I move into the van and put my hand on her head to hold her down against the closed sliding door resting on the street. When she’s out of my line of fire I open up on the men in the front seat, dumping a dozen rounds from my Glock into them.

“Are you hurt?” I shout now as I reload, because my ears are ringing from the gunfire in the closed-in space, and I know the Romanian woman’s virgin ears will be faring much worse.

She shouts back at me. “I . . . I don’t know! This man is on top of me and—”

“Hang on.”

I pull on Talyssa because I can’t get over the seat to get the dead guy off her. It’s hard work getting her turned around and over the seat back, but finally she is able to crawl out under her own power.

Her face is scratched and bruised, and her eyes show mild shock, but she could be a hell of a lot worse, so I count my blessings.

We stand amid the wreckage under a streetlamp; I feel all over my body to double-check that I didn’t catch a bullet. I can’t find anything but sore spots, and painful bruising is a lot better than being ventilated by gunfire.

Another car has stopped behind us and I hear barking dogs and shouting humans in the yards of the homes on our right. I’ve holstered my weapon under my T-shirt; I’m covered with cuts and scrapes and filth from all the scrambling and fighting I’ve been doing over the past half hour, so to the people here I look just like another car crash victim.

But we can’t play this off like a simple traffic accident, since no one for a quarter mile in any direction could have missed the sound of all the shooting.

I help Talyssa along, ignoring the young man who climbs out of the tiny Nissan behind us. Then we get into the Vauxhall. Seconds later I’ve reversed direction and am heading back to the east, moving at a reasonable speed. Flashing lights approach, so I pull into a driveway, as the bullet holes in my windshield are easy to see, even at night.

Once the first responders have continued on to the west, I’m back on the road, and my right hand reaches out to feel over Talyssa’s body. It’s called a blood sweep, a quick way to find an injury on someone who may not even be aware they are injured because of the effects of adrenaline. You have to put your hand everywhere to be sure, and I do this without thinking.

It’s a common practice in my world, but to the uninitiated I imagine it feels a little off.

Instantly she recoils and smacks my hand away. “What . . . what are you doing?”

I pull my hand back to the steering wheel. “Sorry, it’s a thing we do.”

“What? Who does that? No one does that!”

I let it go. “Check yourself, are you bleeding? Are you hurt?”

Coming out of her anger and shock, she does as I ask. After a moment she says, “I . . . I don’t think I am badly injured, but I hit my head when we crashed.” Rubbing her upper arm she says, “My shoulder hurts, but I think I’m okay.”