Like much of the FBI’s Quantico urban tactical training facility known affectionately as Hogan’s Alley, the break room was a Spartan affair, with plywood walls and floors, and Formica tables that looked like they’d been beaten with hammers. The course itself was anything but slapdash, though, right down to its bank, post office, barbershop, and pool hall. And dark doorways, Jack thought. That sure as hell felt real, as had the paint-ball pellet he’d caught between the shoulder blades. It still itched, and he suspected he’d see a good-sized welt later in the shower. But pellet or not, dead was dead. He suspected they’d used paintballs for his benefit. Depending on the scenario being run and the agents running it, Hogan’s Alley could be a lot louder and a lot hairier. Jack had even heard rumors that the HRT-the Hostage Rescue Team-sometimes went live fire. But then again, those guys were the best of the best.
“What about you? You don’t pile on?” Jack asked Brian, who sat slumped in his chair, rocking on two legs. “Might as well get the full lecture.”
Brian shook his head and smiled, nodding at his brother. “His turf, cuz, not mine. You come out to Twenty-nine Palms and we’ll talk.” The Marines had their own frighteningly realistic urban combat training center called MOUT-Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain. “Till then, I’ll keep my mouth shut, thank you very much.”
Dominic rapped a knuckle on the table before Jack. “Cuz, goddamn it, you asked us to bring you here, right?”
The steel in Dominic’s voice was unmistakable, and Jack was momentarily taken aback. What is going on? he wondered. “Right.”
“You wanted to feel what it’s really like, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then stop acting like a little boy who got caught cheating on the spelling bee. This ain’t about lectures. Nobody gives a shit who you are, or whether you made some rookie mistake your third time out. Hell, the first ten times I ran this course I caught a bullet. That doorway you missed? They almost named that damned thing after me, the number of shots I took there.”
Jack believed him. Hogan’s had been training FBI agents for twenty-plus years, and the only ones who shot it perfectly were the ones who’d run it so much they saw it in their dreams. That was the way of everything, Jack knew. Practice makes perfect was not a cliché but in fact an axiom, especially in the military and in law enforcement. Practice cut new grooves into your mental wiring while your body developed muscle memory-performing the same action over and over until muscle and synapse worked in unison and thinking was erased from the equation. How long does that kind of thing take? he wondered.
“Come on…” Jack said.
“Nope. Ask Brandeis. He’ll be happy to tell you. I took plenty of his bullets. Shit, the first two times I walked right by that door and got killed for it. Look, I’m not all that keen on telling you this, but the truth is you did damned good your first time out. Scary good. Hell, who would’ve figured it… My brainiac cousin a gen-u-ine gunslinger.”
“Now you’re humoring me.”
“No, I’m not. Really, man. Jump in, Brian. Tell him.”
“He’s right, Jack. You’re really rough around the edges-hell, you crossed Dom twice in the Laundromat-”
“Crossed?”
“When you’re stacked up outside a room, you know, just before you go in, and then you split up inside, one group moving to the heavy side, the other to the light side-”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“In the Laundromat you sidestepped and tracked your gun outside your zone. Your barrel crossed me-right across the back of the head, in fact. A real no-no.”
“Okay, so lesson number one: Don’t point your gun at your friends.”
Brian laughed. “That’s a way of putting it, yeah. Like I was saying… you’re rough around the edges, but you’ve got great instincts. What, you been holding out on us? Do some training with the Secret Service when you were a kid? Maybe a few vacations with Clark and Chavez?”
Jack shook his head. “No, none of that. I mean, yeah, I shot some guns but nothing like this. I don’t know… It just seemed to play out in my head before it was happening…” Jack shrugged, then smiled. “Maybe got a little of Dad’s Marine DNA. Hell, who knows, maybe I’ve just watched Die Hard too many times.”
“Somehow I don’t think so,” Brian replied. “Well, whatever it is, I wouldn’t mind having you on my six.”
“I’ll second that.”
They raised their cans of Diet Coke and clunked them together.
“About that, guys…” Jack said tentatively. “You remember that thing last year… in Italy?”
Brian and Dominic exchanged glances. “We remember,” Dom said. “Hell of a deal, that.”
“Yeah, well, I was thinking I wouldn’t mind doing some more of it-not that exactly, maybe, but something like it.”
Brian said, “Jesus, cuz, are you talking about unplugging from your keyboard and living in the real world? I can see the devil lacing up his ice skates as we speak.”
“Very funny. No, I like what I do, I know it makes a difference, but that stuff is so intangible. What you guys do-what we did in Italy-that’s the real deal. Hands on, you know? You can see the results with your own eyes.”
“Now that you’ve brought it up,” Dominic said, “I’ve always meant to ask you: Did any of that bother you afterward-not that it should have, necessarily, but let’s face it: You were kind of dumped ass-backward into a shitty situation-if you’ll pardon the pun.”
Jack considered this. “What do you want me to say? That it bothered me? Well, it didn’t. Not really. Sure, I was nervous, and there was a quarter-second just before it happened where I thought, What the hell am I doing? But then it was gone, and it was just me and him, and I just did it. To answer the question I think you’re trying to ask-no, I haven’t lost a wink of sleep over it. You think I should have?”
“Shit, no.” Brian looked around to make sure they were alone, then leaned in close, forearms on the table. “There’s no should about it, Jack. You either do or you don’t. You don’t, and that’s okay. The asshole deserved it. First time I popped a guy, Jack, he had me dead to rights. It was kill or be killed. I put him down, and I knew it was the right thing. Still had a few night-mares, though. Right or wrong, whether he deserves it or not, killing a man ain’t a pleasant thing. Anybody who thinks it is is a little touched in the head. All that gung-ho stuff ain’t really about killing; it’s about doing the job you’ve trained your ass off to be good at, taking care of the guys to your left and right, and coming out the other side with all your fingers and toes.”
“Besides, Jack,” Dominic added, “that guy in Italy, he wouldn’t have just up and quit one day. He would’ve cost a lot of people their lives before somebody sent him on his way. For me, that’s the deal-breaker. A bad guy deserving what he gets is all well and good, but what we’re doing-what this whole thing is about-isn’t revenge, at least not for its own sake. Playing it that way is sort of like shutting the barn door after horses get out. Me, I’d much rather stop the guy who’s planning on opening the barn door in the first place.”
Brian stared hard at his twin brother for a couple of beats and then shook his head and grinned. “I’ll be damned. Mom always said you were the philosopher of the family. I just never believed her till now.”
“Yeah, yeah…” Dominic muttered. “Not so much philosophy as math. Kill one, save hundreds or thousands. If we were talking about decent, law-abiding folks, that’d be a harder equation, but they’re not.”
“I agree with him, Jack,” said Brian. “We’ve got a chance to do some real good here. But if you’re thinking about doing this kind of stuff because you think revenge is the answer, or that it’s all James Bond shit-”