Able was enveloped in agony. His knees swayed and he started to sag. He blacked out before he hit the floor.
Owen Gray knew fifteen patterns on the speed bag, and he could blend them together in a lovely swirling and surging routine. The Everlast leather bag and his mitts were blurs producing a loud pounding rhythm as the bag struck the backboard. Knuckles, backs of his hands, palms, elbows, even his chin, all were used to whip the bag around on its universal joint. The leather mitts were designed for the work, with only a thin padding at the knuckles and with lead bars sewn into the palms to weight the fists.
He might not be much of a boxer, but Gray had mastered the subsidiary skill of bag punching. He worked on the bag with a savage precision. Perspiration slid down his arms and flipped into the air around the reeling bag.
"This is your health club?" the tittering voice asked from the gym door.
Gray lowered his fists and turned to see Mrs. Orlando escorting the twins into the gym. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, showing an acre of white. "Looks like nothing but convicts in here."
Mrs. Orlando was wearing a flowing dress decorated with dozens of tiny red prints of Che Guevara's bearded face. She carried a string purse. Her necklace tinkled lightly as she guided Julie and Carolyn to the bench. "Don't you girls talk to anyone here except maybe your father."
Gray called his thanks to her. She retreated the way she had come, shaking her head all the while. She disappeared through the door.
The oldest twin — Carolyn by five minutes — wore a bulky sweater of a dozen colors and black tights, while Julie had on jeans and a red denim jacket. They never dressed in identical clothes. They turned to watch two boxers spar in the ring.
Gray had asked Mrs. Orlando to bring the girls to the gym because except for their apartment there were few venues where Gray could spend time with his family. With the sniper at large, there were no walks along Bay Ridge avenues, no visits to parks, no shopping trips, no escorting them to school, nothing out of doors, and nothing indoors near windows with distant views. Sam Owl's windows looked across a narrow alley to a brown brick wall. That morning at breakfast Gray had offered to show them the speed bag if they would meet him at his gym, then had to explain what a speed bag was.
The twins had never been to Sam Owl's gym, and they seemed spellbound by the skipping, sparring, and bag punching.
Gray decided to show off. "Watch this, girls."
Then Adrian Wade entered. Sound seemed abruptly sucked from the room. The speed bags were silenced. The boxers lowered their gloves. The heavy bags swung loosely. The gymnasium became as still as a photograph. Her eyes swept left and right as if her head were a turret.
Gray groaned when Adrian Wade's gaze found him. She marched around the ring in his direction. In the faded, steamy, tumbledown gymnasium she was wildly out of place, an electric flash of fierce colors. A spotlight seemed to pick her up, and the gym became even duller, with its olive and pea-green and dun shades fading away. Even the magnificent boxing mural lost its luster. All eyes were on her, ogling and appreciating as she made her way to the speed bags. Adrian seemed aware of her effect and accepted the silence as her due. The slightest of smiles — perhaps one of mild cynicism — passed across the surface of her face like a breeze.
From the ring Benny Jones said, "Thank you, God. My dating service finally came through."
She winked at him, a slow, lascivious, welder's torch of a wink. Jones returned a gratified grin.
She was wearing a tight black skirt that ended two inches above her knees and a cedar green jacket over a white silk blouse. Around her neck was a thin silver chain. Again Gray was startled by the contrast between her fire-red mouth, raven hair, and blue eyes, immaculate colors setting off her bone-white face. She was carrying a manila envelope.
"It smells like old sweat socks in here," she said to Gray.
"Yeah, it's great, isn't it?"
"I've got news, none of it good."
"That bench is my new office. Come on over."
The twins drew themselves up, awkwardly and anxiously, prepared for an introduction. But their father said briskly, "Girls, I need to talk to this lady. Will you excuse us?"
"Your daughters?" Adrian asked. "Introduce me."
The twins might have been witnessing the raising of the dead from the Gospels. They seemed incapable of expression, their faces frozen by bafflement. Carolyn and Julie had never seen their father with a woman. Maybe a thank-you to a sales clerk or a quick word with a librarian. Mrs. Orlando didn't count. This was a real woman, someone their father's age, and so thoroughly attractive, a woman who belonged on a fashion magazine cover. This was a person of fluent confidence and obvious dignity, someone plainly of substance. And — could it be? — she had come to visit their father. It simply wasn't within their experience. Their eyes mirrored their wonder. Gray missed it, but Adrian rapidly searched their faces and may have understood.
She stepped close to the twins and extended her hand, first to one, then the other. Her smile might have been given to long lost loved ones. Her eyes engaged them fully and excluded all else in the gym, and certainly Gray. For a few moments it seemed all that mattered in the world were Owen Gray's daughters. They flushed with the attention and fairly stammered their replies. After a few minutes, Adrian Wade had learned much about school and piano practice and Bay Ridge and Mrs. Orlando.
Gray thought it a calculating inveiglement. She was overpowering his daughters and entrancing them, doubtless to irk him. He scanned the room. The fighters were slowly returning to their workouts. Joe Leonard smiled knowingly at Gray and mouthed, "Wow." Sam Owl was still staring at Adrian Wade as if she were an alien.
"We'd love to," both girls said as one. They were bouncing with excitement.
"Give me a few minutes with your father, then off we'll go."
Gray hadn't been listening. "Off you go? Where?"
She looked at him. "It's time for your girls to wear a little lipstick."
"Looks like you've got plenty to spare," he said, pleased with himself.
She ignored the jab. "I'm going to show them a few things at Bloomingdale's cosmetics counters."
"That place is the gate to hell. I don't want Carolyn and Julie anywhere near there."
"Well, that's settled," Adrian said, grinning at them. "We'll catch a cab uptown in a minute, girls."
The twins cheered.
"Am I just bumping my gums here?" Gray objected. "Is anybody listening?"
She took him by an elbow and turned him to the bench. The girls moved to a corner of the gym near the water fountain but could not remove their eyes from her.
Adrian lowered herself to the bench. "Your friend Sergeant Able at Quantico has been hurt. So has Sergeant Blackman."
Gray drew in a sharp breath.
She told him about the assault at the rifle range the night before, and ended with "Sergeant Blackman will be all right, a week in the hospital and then he'll need physical therapy. Sergeant Able has a broken nose, and was treated and released from the base hospital. He is back on duty already. The sergeants were hurt by someone who knew how to do it, someone with experience who was fast and competent."
"But what was he doing?"
She replied with gravity, "The only thing taken was your sniper rifle from Vietnam. Your Winchester .30–06."
Gray sank back against the chipped wall. He was wearing a blue sweatshirt that hid the scar on his neck. He peeled off the mitts to wipe sweat from his forehead. He ran his fingers through his dark hair. "I should've pitched that goddamn thing into the South China Sea when I had the chance."
She pulled a five-by-seven photograph from the manila envelope. "This is our man. Nikolai Trusov. It's his service ID photograph. General Kulikov wired it from Moscow this morning and we had it blown up. There isn't a sheriff or police department or FBI office on the east coast that doesn't have a copy by now. Kulikov also sent Trusov's fingerprints. The police agencies have them, too, and the prints have already produced results."