“I’ll explain.”

There was another beat of silence.

“OK,” she said. “Don’t wipe out on the way over.”

Carmody grinned behind his visor. Then he split the lane and throttled open, blowing past the slow-moving cars ahead of him.

At the Terminal a short while later, Carmody touched his thumb to a bioscanner, waited as a thick, stainless steel sliding door retracted into the wall, then stepped through into the gun training area.

He stood looking down its length as the door whispered shut. The long interior space was divided into two sections. Its physical range had a dozen firing lanes, four stretched out to one or two hundred yards for rifles, the rest at thirty and fifty yards for handguns and carbines. There were lighting controls, moving targets and other programmable features, but it was fundamentally no-frills, the kind of setup Carmody used for his practice shooting. If you wanted to earn your quals, you had to do it here at the scored-target physical range.

The other section, separated from the lanes by a floor-to-ceiling acoustical partition wall, was a three-hundred-degree, interactive firearms training simulator. The sort Carmody rarely used for himself. Its five huge, high-definition laser projection screens, arranged in a surround-theater configuration, thrust the trainee into a realistic shooting scenario. The weapons were authentic, though adapted for CO2 cartridges and fitted with laser-guidance attachments.

Carmody found Scott Dixon at the sim room’s control station throwing virtual bedlam at a group of three recruits. One held a Benelli M2 12-gauge, the others MP7 submachine guns.

Dixon was brown-haired, thick-featured and squarely built. He wore a snug navy blue T-shirt and had a Navy SEALS trident medallion hanging over its collar on a short gold chain. On his left bicep was a tattoo of a General Electric television with color bands on the screen. The name Else was written across the bands in looping graffiti-style letters. Else was his girl in Munich.

Carmody came up to him from behind and stopped to his right. Dixon’s station had an angled dual display, a gooseneck microphone, a joystick control and a computer keyboard. The display showed a scaled-down mirror of the scenario on the projection screens: winding stone-and-mortar corridors, ornate rugs, mounted suits of armor. Shooters in helmets and armored vests sprang out from behind corners, their weapons chattering. The walls swept past, and then the recruits were plunging down a set of worn granite stairs into darkness.

“Castle Graguscu,” Carmody said.

Dixon nodded.

“You ought to remember.”

“They know it only gets worse at the bottom of that stairwell?”

Dixon shook his head. “I like to keep ’em guessing.”

Carmody was quiet a moment.

“The reason I came is to tell you to be ready,” he said. “You and Long.”

“For?”

“We’re heading back to Romania.”

“When?”

“Day after tomorrow, hopefully.”

“Thanks for the generous notice.”

Carmody shrugged. “I could have told you tomorrow.”

“Or the day after, I suppose.”