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Prologue

HOME INVASION

One

GEORGETOWN, WASHINGTON, DC

The surname of the family was Cox, the father a very successful trial lawyer, but the target was the ht, just minutes away The payday was excellent, couldn’t be better

The six-foot-six, two-hundred-fifty-pound killer known as “the Tiger” had given out guns to his tearam of cocaine to share, and the only instruction they would need tonight: The mother is mine Kill the rest

His secondary mission was to scare the American meddlers He kne they felt about home invasions, and their precious families, and ht to be conducted The secret to beating them was to break all their silly, sacred rules

He settled down to watch the house from the street Wood blinds in the first-floor s drew horizontal lines across the family members as they athered outside

The boys waited restlessly at the Tiger’s side, and he waited for instinct to tell him it was time to move on the house

“Now,” he said, “we go!”

Then, with only the slightest bend and whack of the knees, he began to run, breaking out of the careen, his strides almost too fast to count

A single, powerful leap and he was up on the stoop of the house Next ca blows to the front door It seemed to explode open, and they were inside, the kill team, all five of them

The boys, none older than seventeen, strea roo orders that were hard to understand because their English was not at the level of the Tiger’s

The children of the house screalets; their lawyer father leapt up and tried to shield them with his flabby, overfed body

“You are pitiful!” the Tiger shouted at him “You can’t even protect your family in your own house”

Soon enough, three fa room mantel, which was covered with birthday cards addressed to “Moht”

The leader nudged the youngest of his boys forward, the one who had chosen the naious sense of huer said

The boy was eleven years old and fearless as a crocodile in a er than his own hand and fired it into the shivering father’s forehead

The other boys howled their approval, shooting off rounds in all directions, overturning antique furniture, breakingone another

One particularly scary, blank-faced boy in a Houston Rockets jersey eazine into the wide-screen television, then reloaded “Rock da house!” he shouted

Two

THE MOTHER, “DARLING ELLIE,” “Sweetness and Light,” finally ca down the stairs for her Akata babies

“Leave them out of this!” she yelled at the tall and very muscular leader “I knoho you are!”