there—like that rare creature, a smart bad guy—and exceptions get you killed.”
“You’re right,” Jack muttered, taking a sip of Diet Coke. “Damn.”
Along with Brian, who’d sat out the last exercise, he and Dominic had regrouped in the break room after being debriefed by Brandeis, who hadn’t pulled any punches, former President’s son or not. He’d told Jack basically the same thing Dominic was saying, only in a more entertaining fashion. Brandeis, a native Mississippian, had an aw-shucks, Will Rogers way about him that took some sting out of the criticism. Some, but not all of it. What’d you think, Jack, that you’d come here and walk out an expert?
Like much of the FBI’s Quantico urban tactical training facility known affectionately as Hogan’s Alley, the break room was a Spartan affair, with plywood walls and floors, and Formica tables that looked like they’d been beaten with hammers. The course itself was anything but slapdash, though, right down to its bank, post office, barbershop, and pool hall. And dark doorways, Jack thought. That sure as hell felt real, as had the paint-ball pellet he’d caught between the shoulder blades. It still itched, and he suspected he’d see a good-sized welt later in the shower. But pellet or not, dead was dead. He suspected they’d used paintballs for his benefit. Depending on the scenario being run and the agents running it, Hogan’s Alley could be a lot louder and a lot hairier. Jack had even heard rumors that the HRT—the Hostage Rescue Team—sometimes went live fire. But then again, those guys were the best of the best.
“What about you? You don’t pile on?” Jack asked Brian, who sat slumped in his chair, rocking on two legs. “Might as well get the full lecture.”
Brian shook his head and smiled, nodding at his brother. “His turf, cuz, not mine. You come out to Twenty-nine Palms and we’ll talk.” The Marines had their own frighteningly realistic urban combat training center called MOUT—Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain. “Till then, I’ll keep my mouth shut, thank you very much.”
Dominic rapped a knuckle on the table before Jack. “Cuz, goddamn it, you asked us to bring you here, right?”
The steel in Dominic’s voice was unmistakable, and Jack was momentarily taken aback. What is going on? he wondered. “Right.”
“You wanted to feel what it’s really like, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then stop acting like a little boy who got caught cheating on the spelling bee. This ain’t about lectures. Nobody gives a shit who you are, or whether you made some rookie mistake your third time out. Hell, the first ten times I ran this course I caught a bullet. That doorway you missed? They almost named that damned thing after me, the number of shots I took there.”
Jack believed him. Hogan’s had been training FBI agents for twenty-plus years, and the only ones who shot it perfectly were the ones who’d run it so much they saw it in their dreams. That was the way of everything, Jack knew. Practice makes perfect was not a cliché but in fact an axiom, especially in the military and in law enforcement. Practice cut new grooves into your mental wiring while your body developed muscle memory—performing the same action over and over until muscle and synapse worked in unison and thinking was erased from the equation. How long does that kind of thing take? he wondered.
“Come on. ...” Jack said.
“Nope. Ask Brandeis. He’ll be happy to tell you. I took plenty of his bullets. Shit, the first two times I walked right by that door and got killed for it. Look, I’m not all that keen on telling you this, but the truth is you did damned good your first time out. Scary good. Hell, who would’ve figured it . . . My brainiac cousin a gen-u-ine gunslinger.”
“Now you’re humoring me.”
“No, I’m not. Really, man. Jump in, Brian. Tell him.”
“He’s right, Jack. You’re really rough around the edges—hell, you crossed Dom twice in the Laundromat—”
“Crossed?”
“When you’re stacked up outside a room, you know, just before you go in, and then you split up inside, one group moving to the heavy side, the other to the light side—”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“In the Laundromat you sidestepped and tracked your gun outside your zone. Your barrel crossed me—right across the back of the head, in fact. A real no-no.”
“Okay, so lesson number one: Don’t point your gun at your friends.”
Brian laughed. “That’s a way of putting it, yeah. Like I was saying . . . you’re rough around the