He stopped a foot short of the door and leaned against the wall, feeling the flex in the plasterboard and timber frame — not much good for stopping bullets. He hunkered down below eye level like he’d been taught and slipped his scoping mirror from his belt then past the edge of the doorjamb.
Daylight leaked in through high, narrow windows, sketching the outline of a room: another door set into the far wall, a table in the center spilling over with various items — a man and a woman standing directly behind it.
The skin tightened on Shepherd’s scalp. The man’s eyes, framed by safety goggles, seemed to be staring straight at him. He saw a hand clamp tighter across the face of the terrified woman, held in front of him like a shield, saw the other hand rising up.
He leaped away just as gunfire shattered the cold silence and bullets smacked into the wall where he had been resting. He rolled into a new position farther down the corridor and leveled his gun at the door. “FBI!” he shouted. “Drop your weapon and come out slowly with your hands on your head. We have the building surrounded.”
Not true.
He was a lone agent following a cold lead that had just gone volcanic.
He heard noises coming from the room, something clattering to the floor then footsteps scuffing away. He moved forward in a crouch, gun just below his line of sight, free hand reaching for a stun grenade on his belt. He pulled the pin and tossed it around the door frame.
The grenade clattered across the floor, clanged against the metal leg of the table then detonated with a lightning flash that Shepherd saw even behind his closed eyelids. A sharp, percussive boom shook the wall and he was up and into the room.
No one there. Far door open.
He ran through the white magnesium smoke, performing a quick inventory of the table as he passed: 9-volt batteries, wire cutters, soldering iron, duct tape, vacuum packs of plastique. Bomb-making equipment.
The smart move would be to regroup and call for backup, but the suspect knew he was cornered. He had fired shots and fled, even after Shepherd had identified himself as FBI. He was desperate, and therefore unpredictable.
And he had a hostage.
If Shepherd waited for other units to show, the suspect would probably kill the woman and make a run for it. But right now he was vulnerable, his ears ringing from the pressure wave of the grenade, his eyes useless in the gloom of the basement. Shepherd had the advantage, but it was slight and wouldn’t last for more than the next few seconds. He had to make a choice.
He took a breath and swept his gun arm around the edge of the door frame, following it into the second room. The suspect was in the far corner, backed up against the wall, the hostage still in front of him and terrified.
Shepherd stood square on, maximizing the cover of his body armor, his gun steady in a good two-hand hold, trying to fix the front sight on what he could see of the suspect’s face. With his peripheral vision he sucked in the detail of the room: a single mattress on the floor; a low table next to it; a movie poster tacked to the wall with a burnt orange sun and slashed white lettering. His mouth went dry as buried memories rushed out of his past.
The dank smell…
…the same sun on the same poster…
…a room just like this.
He tried to zone it all out, keeping his eyes on the suspect and his mind on the here and now, but the sun kept pulling at him with something like real gravity, dragging him back to that dark, dark place he had done everything he could to forget.
His hand began to tremble. The suspect was shouting but he couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then he saw a hand rise up. Something in it. Some kind of button with a wire trailing down to the belt bomb wound around the hostage’s neck.
Behind them the sun blazed on the wall like an omen of the explosion to come. Shepherd felt weak. He couldn’t hold it together. His whole world condensed to the end of his gun and the suspect’s face came into focus along with the words on the movie poster.
Apocalypse Now
He pulled the trigger.
Adjusted for recoil — everything muscle memory now, drilled in deep from hours on the range — squeezed off another round. Saw an explosion of red beyond his gun sight. Then he watched in silence as both suspect and hostage fell in crumpled slow motion to the ground.
In the stillness that followed, Shepherd felt everything drain out of him. His eyes drifted back to the molten sun, his hand dropped to his side, the red-handled gun dangling from his curled trigger finger. He didn’t even feel the instructor take it from him, or register the fluorescent lights flickering into life above his head. In his mind he was still back there, staring at the same poster on a different wall — the room where she had found him and they had saved each other.
“…Shepherd…!”
The voice seemed to come from very far away.
“SHEPHERD — YOU OKAY?”
The granite face of Special Agent Williams slid into view, obscuring the poster and breaking the spell.
Shepherd blinked.
Nodded.
“You made some tactical errors.”
He nodded again.
“Get yourself over to the Biograph for a debrief.” The practical applications instructor slapped him on the back with a hand made solid from years of pulling triggers and turned to the two actors, already on their feet and tugging wet wipes from their pockets to clean away the red dye from Shepherd’s training pistol. They each had an impact mark on their foreheads, just above the eye. Kill shots both.
“Back to initial positions,” Williams barked. “Next trainee coming through in five.”
3
Shepherd stepped out of the front door of the town house into the teeth of a westerly wind straight off Chesapeake Bay and headed away along Main Street.
Hogan’s Alley covered ten acres of the marine base in Quantico and was built as a microcosm of any-town America with its own bank, drugstore, hotel, gas station — basically all the institutions criminals targeted out in the real world. Normally, the whole town echoed with radio buzz, shouted orders and the crackle of gunfire from FBI, DEA and other assorted law-enforcement officers as they learned the art of urban tactical deployment. Today it was almost deserted, like everywhere else, as the whole base wound down for the Christmas holidays. Shepherd noticed a stuffed Santa dangling from an upper window of the Coin-Op Laundromat swinging in the strengthening wind like a hanged man. Someone had shot him in the ass with a paint round: so much for the Christmas spirit.
He hunched his shoulders against the chill and looked up at the night sky out of habit. The evening star had already risen in the west and, as he looked at it, a huge flock of geese streaked across the sky, their loud honks making him pause. The ancients would have read much into the direction of the birds’ flight and the position of the wandering star in the sky. But Shepherd knew it was just nature and that the shifting star was actually the planet Venus whose brightness had always been a comfort to him, even in his most desperate and lonely nights.
He turned the corner just as the streetlights flickered on in response to the creep of night. At the far end of the block, more light leaked onto the sidewalk from the foyer of the Biograph, named after the movie theater in Chicago where John Dillinger had been gunned down in the midthirties. The marquee above the entrance advertised Manhattan Melodrama starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy, the last movie Dillinger had ever seen. Shepherd reached the unmanned ticket booth and pushed through the door into the space where the foyer should have been.