The mid-size room is windowless, partitioned into four central soundproof cubicles that enclose counters and computer workstations. The double-depth multimedia filing /storage units built into the walls are six feet high, with slide-out drawers and rotating shelves in steel housings. Quick access systems, no doors, no locks. It doesn’t surprise Ricci. The staffers allowed into this office, this entire wing of the building, would have wide clearance anyway.

He moves deeper into the room, turns to Nichols.

“You better stand outside in the hall, watch my back,” he says, forking two fingers at his own eyes. “Keep alert.”

It seems a fundamentally obvious and sensible call for Ricci. He does not know how long he will be in the room. He doesn’t even know exactly what he’s looking for. But he does know he’ll be vulnerable and distracted while he forages around in here. Watch my back, keep alert. Obvious.

Nichols looks at him with an expression that Ricci notes without quite being able to characterize it. In months to come, on the countless nights of poisoned sleep when that moment replays itself in his thoughts, he will understand it is plain and simple gratitude—for the second chance Nichols has been given, and the confidence being placed in him.

The moment passes. Then the kid gives Ricci a crisp little nod that has about it the quality of a salute, turns, and goes back through the door toward his encounter with the Killer, and the hail of bullets that will rip the life out of his body . . .

Ricci was jolted back to the reality of the firing range, this time by his heart’s heavy beating. He’d gotten caught somewhere between past and present again, as if they had converged around him in a kind of dizzying overlap—the dashed, rudimentary lines of the target figure’s face becoming the sharply defined features of the Killer as Ricci first saw them years ago. He had never gotten his chance at that savage monster inside Earthglow, but there had been a time long before that, when they had grappled hand to hand in yet another faraway place, fighting to an impasse at the Russian Cosmodrome. There, as in Ontario, the Killer had escaped him, vanishing into the benighted Kazakhstan mountains amid the fierce, final combat of what would be logged in Sword’s mission files as Operation: Shadow Watch.