Egon had been living on the brink of collapse since the dramatic warning last month when his favorite sports car had been wired and blown up in his own courtyard. The car had been parked only ten feet from his front door. In broad daylight. Every window on the palazzo facade had been shattered, the entrance door blown off its hinges. The damaged building had resembled jaws of hell, explicit in its threat. Not that he'd needed the additional persuasion.

Egon von Mansfeld knew what Shakin Rifat and his cadre were capable of. He'd been a fool to indulge him beyond the polite amenities of the society they both occasionally frequented. Shakin Rifat was no ordinary arms broker. As head of a family once influential in Turkish government, Rifat had connections in Europe. Supporters and sympathizers. He was always in the market for arms. And Egon von Mansfeld was one of the heirs to West Germany's second largest munitions works. Even high, Egon knew why Rifat had approached him. But the euphoria was too strong that night at the party after the races. He hadn't politely declined and walked away. He'd listened to Rifat's proposition. And bragged too much. The next day, after he'd come down, he'd backed out of the preliminary negotiations for the submachine gun prototypes the Von Mansfeld Works were developing.

Shakin Rifat hadn't been pleased. He'd been coveting the weapon ever since word of its revolutionary features had first leaked out. It was a caseless submachine gun radically different from any weapon design of the last fifty years. In experimental trials it had fired up to 2000 r.p.m., a virtual impossibility with conventional firearms. The single smooth outer casing had no protuberances or holes, and the pistol grip was at the point of balance. It had an unusual fifty-round throwaway magazine of plastic with small windows in the casing to allow the firer to see how many rounds were left. But its most novel features were its rotating cylinder mechanism and moving magazine, a design entirely different from anything that had been seen before in small arms, or in any other weapon for that matter.