the information, perhaps already in his head, and if not, he certainly had access to it. She absently wondered why they had chosen to use her rather than to simply snatch him off the street and extract the information through blunt force. She suspected the answer had as much to do with where he worked as it did the unreliability of torture. If Steve disappeared or turned up dead under even remotely suspicious circumstances, there would be an investigation by not only the local police but the FBI as well, and that kind of scrutiny was something her employer was probably quite anxious to avoid. Still, the fact that they hadn’t chosen the more direct method told her something: The information they needed was both critical and extraordinary. Steve was perhaps their only viable source of the information, which meant it was either highly protected elsewhere or his grasp of it was singular.
Not that it mattered. She would do the job, take the money, and then . . . well, who knew?
Her fee was considerable, enough perhaps to give her a head start on a new life somewhere else, doing something else for a living. Something ordinary, like being a librarian or a book-keeper. She smiled at the thought. Ordinary might be nice. She would have to be very careful, though, with these people. However they were planning to use this information, it was clearly of deadly importance. Important enough to kill over, she suspected.
Back to work . . .
She lazily traced her fingernails over his chest. “You’re not, like, in danger or anything, are you? I mean, from cancer or anything?”
“Well, no,” he said, “not really. I guess there’s some risk, but they’ve got protocols and rules and regulations—enough that you’d have to really screw up to get hurt.”
“So it’s never happened—to anyone?”
“Sure, but usually it’s dumb stuff, like some guy getting his foot run over by a forklift or choking on nachos in the cafeteria. We’ve had a couple close calls in . . . in other places, but that was usually because somebody tried to cut a corner, and even when that happens, there’re backup systems and procedures. Believe me, babe, I’m pretty safe.”
“Good; I’m glad. I hate to think of you hurt or sick.”
“That’s not going to happen, Ali. I’m very careful.”
We’ll see, she thought.
13
JACK JUNIOR PRESSED HIMSELF flat against the wall and slid forward along it, feeling the splinters in the rough plank boards catch on his shirt. He reached the corner and stopped, weapon held in the Weaver stance doublehanded grip, barrel pointed downward. Not like Hollywood or cop TV shows, he thought, where they carried the gun pointed barrel-up beside their faces. Sure, it looked cool—nothing framed a hero’s lantern jaw and steely blue eyes like a chunky Glock—but this wasn’t about cool, this was about staying alive and putting down the bad guys. Growing up in the White House surrounded by Secret Service pros who knew guns better than they knew their own kids certainly had its advantages, didn’t it?
The problem with the Hollywood model of gun handling was twofold: site picture and ambush. Real-world combat hand-gunning was about shooting straight and true under pressure, and that, in turn, was all about mind-set and site picture. The former was about conditioning; the latter, mechanics. It was a lot easier and a lot more effective to bring a weapon up, get a good site picture of the target, and snap off a shot than it was doing it in the reverse. The other factor—the ambush—was all about what happens when you turn a corner to find yourself face-to-face with a bad guy. Do you want your gun up, by your face, or do you want it down where you might, just might, have a chance to snap off a shot into the guy’s legs before he tackles you and the situation devolves into a no-holds-barred wrestling match? That didn’t happen very often, of course, but as far as Jack was concerned, and as far as real shooters were concerned, it was much better to be wrestling a bad guy who had a 9-millimeter slug or two in his leg than not.
Theory, Jack, he reminded himself, returning to the here and now. Theories are for the classroom, not the real world.
Where the hell was Dominic? They’d separated at the front door, Dominic moving right to take the house’s back rooms—the potentially more “heavy” rooms—Jack to the left, heading for the more open kitchen and