He nods, claps Rosander’s shoulder, shifts his gaze to Nichols, who is young, green, and has made mistakes in training that might have gotten someone else dismissed from the team. In fact, the kid had been prepared to lay his head on the chopping block afterward. But Ricci had seen some of his own fire in Nichols’s eyes—only a cleaner, brighter, untainted flame—and convinced him to stay on.

“Ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ricci nods again.

“Come on, it’s you and me,” he says, and they hurry on along the corridor, leaving the other two men behind to guard their rear.

Though Ricci cannot know it, the next time he sees them they will be dead on the floor near the elevator, Simmons bleeding out from multiple bullet wounds to the side of his rib cage, Rosander with a crushed windpipe, and his brains oozing from a point-blank gunshot to the head meant to finish him off like an animal in a slaughterhouse pen.

And that will not be the worst of it. Unbelievably, unbearably, not the worst . . .

Ricci heard the flat, electronically baffled report of his gun through his earmuffs—a sound that tugged him from the sinkhole of memory with his finger still tight on the trigger. He took in the present like a drowning man starved for air as the third firing-range badguy went down, caught by a single clean shot. The Five-Seven raised level with his chest, Ricci stood waiting, ready, wanting to stay fluid as the tac sequence progressed. To keep his mind on the controllable here and now, and resist the desirous undertow of the past.

A second ticked by. Ricci breathed, exhaled. Ready. Steady. A crouched figure appeared from the right side of the course, the computerized lights dimming around it for a little added mischief and chaos. Go! Ricci swiveled his extended arms, sighted over the nub of his gun barrel, and bang. Crouching badguy was no more.

Ricci held a motionless shooter’s stance. Took another breath. Kept trying not to think but to be. Here, now. In the moment, as the movie stars liked to say. Then a fifth badguy sprang out at him, standing at full height, facing Ricci from the middle of the corridor—

No, no. The firing lane.

Ricci swore to himself. Just what moment had he been in?

He got that biting, bitter taste in his mouth again, his gun swinging into position, his finger starting its deadly squeeze . . . and stopping.

Another figure had sprung up out of nowhere directly in front of the badguy. A woman, her painted-on eyes wide, her painted-on mouth gaping in a silent scream, the expression a cartoon facsimile of terror. Ricci held his fire. This was goddamned unexpected. Sure, why not? Unexpected was the whole point of this exercise.

Clever fucking software.

Practice badguy, practice hostage.