The Switch

60

The man Will Abbott hired to give him a gun lesson was a mountain of a man, a retired DC cop with a deep, rumbling voice that seemed to vibrate the card table they were sitting at.

“You ever shoot a gun before?” the man asked. He was a black man in his sixties with a large domed head and close-cropped white hair.

Will nodded. “One lesson, once. A while ago. So let’s start from the beginning.”

“First thing is, treat all guns as if they’re loaded.”

The cop, named Joe Randall, shoved a revolver across the table at Will. Joe Randall was an employee of this gun range, an indoor range in northeast, close to the National Arboretum.

“Go ahead, pick it up.”

Will considered interrupting his rap and telling the guy to speed it up. He didn’t want to learn safety and handling and all that crap; he wanted to learn how to shoot to kill someone.

He knew that if he focused on logistics, the how-to, he could distract himself from his terror of getting caught. And getting caught was unthinkable. There would be no explaining himself without dragging in the boss.

Will picked up the gun as if it were loaded and he planned to kill Joe Randall: he gripped it in his right hand and poked a finger into the trigger.

“No!” Randall said. “Jesus, no. Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. You have no idea if that thing’s loaded or not!”

“You’re right,” Will said meekly, and set it back down on the table. “But can you teach me on a semiautomatic pistol instead of a revolver?”

“You start with the alphabet. The basics. A revolver is more basic.”

“Okay, sure. You’re the boss.” Will said it lightly, but it sounded off, condescending. He knew he had that tendency, which he’d have to moderate if he was going to make it to the big white house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the center of the universe, as far as he was concerned.

“You want to learn on a pistol, I’ll teach you on a pistol. But for the license you got to know both.”

“I understand.”

Randall slid another gun over to Will, a Smith & Wesson nine millimeter. He taught Will to load bullets, which he called “shells,” into the magazine. Will paid close attention. He figured he’d have to do this just once, anyway. He’d figure it out when he had to. He wanted only to make the shot, make it once, kill the guy, and get out. Without being connected to it.

Will learned how to load the magazine into the magazine well, which was in the handle of the pistol. How to grip the slide overhand and pull it back and let it go. That was how you inserted the first cartridge. Will was unclear about the difference between a shell and a cartridge and a bullet and a round; Joe Randall seemed to use them interchangeably.

Will started paying closer attention now, even though his mind was, at the same time, thinking about a couple of e-mails he had to write. Work stuff. He felt bad leaving work as early as he had, at five, and he knew he’d have to spend at least an hour at the computer at home before he went to bed. And he knew that Jen would want him to take over with Travis the second his feet touched home. Sometimes she’d almost shove the baby at him, a live grenade.

“You got me?” Randall said. “You just inserted the first cartridge into the chamber. Your gun is now loaded, right? It’s loaded. You are packing heat. Keep that thing pointed in a safe direction, and do not point this at anything you don’t want to blow clean away. Right?”

“Right.”

“Point that thing downrange.”

Will fumbled for a moment.

“That way.” Randall pushed the muzzle of the gun away. “Every time you fire, this pistol ejects the old round and loads a new one until your magazine is empty.”

“Okay.”

Will sat up straighter. He was excited. His phone, in his coat pocket, rang. He let it go, even though he suspected it might be Susan. He wasn’t all that far from Capitol Hill; he could return to the office quickly if he had to.

Randall put out both hands, palms up. “May I have your weapon, please?”

Will handed the gun back, carefully pointing it off to the side.

Randall did something complicated and quick to the gun, and suddenly he’d taken it apart, or at least separated the business part of the pistol from the magazine full of bullets, or cartridges, or whatever.

“I want you to load the next magazine,” Randall said.

“Okay,” Will said. “But really I need to learn how to aim halfway accurately and, you know, shoot. Actually shoot.”

Will felt sick to his stomach all of a sudden. Joe Randall was a retired policeman, for God’s sake. Which he hadn’t known until he arrived at the gun range this afternoon. He would never have knowingly taken shooting lessons from an ex-cop. That was just asking to get arrested. “I’m going hunting with my brother-in-law,” he said. “I just need to not make a total fool of myself.” He chuckled.

“Then you want to learn on long guns! I can teach you that, but not here, it’s gotta be outside, and—”

“I just need to learn how to shoot. You know, hit the target.” He pointed to a battered old paper target pinned to the wall, a black silhouette of a man with arms at his sides. In the middle of the man’s chest was a neat round hole, and around it were decreasing numbers in concentric oval rings. The hole was probably where ten bullets had punched through, one right on top of the other. A bull’s-eye.

“How far you gonna be from the target?” Randall asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe five or ten feet?”

“That close? What are you hunting?”

“I–I have no idea. Game, probably.” He didn’t know if game meant birds or all animals. “Just need to learn how to shoot.”

Will’s mind wandered briefly. He thought about Gary Sapolsky’s flushed face, the way he carried that sad little box of his earthly possessions. How bad he felt about it, but how, at the same time, proud. He had set this in motion skillfully. Gary had to go. The FBI and the NSA were probably already combing through Gary’s articles for his college student newspaper, whatever the Wesleyan paper was called, looking for a radical anti-American bias. That was the thing about federal investigations: they went on forever, moved lumberingly, and never seemed to end.

Michael Tanner, by holding on to the senator’s laptop, was extorting him. He probably wanted some giant payday. But he had also done the one thing Will had feared most: he had handed it to the press. These days, the news media were on the lookout for violations of civil liberties they could blast the White House on. And CHRYSALIS was surveillance taken to a new extreme. The press would be all over it.

And the NSA and the entire security apparatus of the US government would not give up until they’d found out how the plan had leaked.

The public, the rest of the Senate — in fact, everyone — would assume that Susan Robbins had deliberately leaked it for political reasons, because she wanted the program killed. But whatever Susan actually felt on the subject, and Will didn’t know for sure, she was savvy enough to know that extremists don’t make it to the White House. No one must ever know that the leak had come from her, because no one would believe that it was accidental.

But if what actually happened came out, Susan would be damaged far more. She had directed her chief of staff to copy documents and take them, in violation of all procedure, out of a secure environment. So that Senator Robbins, who couldn’t be bothered with sitting in a locked SCIF, reading documents, could have the luxury of reading it on her flight to LA.

The outrage would be swift and severe. No politician who had deliberately mishandled classified information would ever make it to the White House.

He’d lose his job, of course. She would have to fire him; he’d insist on it. He’d hate it if this ever happened. He daydreamed about walking into the Oval Office unannounced and advising Susan on how to handle the latest crisis with, say, China.

But if all that stood between him and unscheduled visits to the Oval Office was this one arrogant coffee merchant, this rich guy with his own name on his company, then he knew what he would do.

It would be like when he decapitated that rabid raccoon all those years ago. There was a part of him, that dark place, that could not only commit an act of violence but thrill to it.

As long as he wasn’t caught.

He just had to get to Tanner before the NSA did.

“Isosceles,” Randall was saying. “Can you do that? If you can’t, we’ll learn the Weaver.”

Learning the proper stance was easy. When he finally pulled the trigger he heard only a disappointing little click, because the gun wasn’t actually loaded. He put on a pair of safety glasses, like he used to wear in shop class in high school, and a pair of headphone-type things, which Randall called “ear protection.”

Randall took a fresh target paper and clipped it to a bracket in the lane in front of them, then flicked a switch, and the paper zipped forward twenty feet. Then he loaded a full magazine into the gun and handed it back to Will.

“Okay,” he said. “Fighting stance, knees shoulder width apart, one leg slightly back. That’s it.”

This time when he pulled the trigger — line up the front sight with the top of the notch on the rear sight, start to exhale, pull the trigger slowly, equal pressure all the way back, keep it steady, no movement — it made an explosion that, even with the ear protection, jolted him.

“Nice job!” Randall said. Will hadn’t seen the man smile before. He had a big gap in his front teeth. “You’re a natural.”

Will was a natural. Randall was right. Never again did he hit the target dead center, on the bull’s-eye, but most of his shots stayed within the concentric ovals. A good “grouping,” Randall said.

He seemed to have an aptitude for it. At least at twenty feet. When Randall moved the target back to fifty feet, it was more challenging. Plenty of his “rounds” hit the paper outside the black silhouette or missed the target entirely. Then again, some came pretty close to the center. Randall seemed to be impressed with him.

Anyway, he didn’t expect to be aiming at Tanner from fifty feet away. That was a chance he wasn’t going to take.

Even though gunfire kept startling him — he might not ever get over that — he felt an excitement that emanated from his groin, where he actually stiffened. He hoped Randall didn’t notice.

As long as he thought of Tanner as that rabid raccoon in the garage, rather than a human being, he would hit the target. Even with his adrenaline pumping away, and maybe even running, if he had to.

“Your brother-in-law is going to be impressed,” Joe Randall said.

“My— Oh right, yeah, he will.”

“Where do you live?”

Why was the guy asking that? Will wondered, suddenly alert. “Stanton Park,” Will said. “Why?”

“Living in the district, it’s not so easy. It’s going to take you four trips to the police department, two background checks, fingerprints, a five-hour class, and almost a thousand bucks in fees.”

“What’s not so easy?”

“Getting a license to carry. You’re trying for that, right?”

“I told you, it’s just for this hunting trip I’m going on—”

“You should. You got a gift.”

Randall flicked a switch again, and the target zipped toward them. He unclipped the paper from the bracket and handed it to Will. “Souvenir.”

“Oh.” Will laughed. “No, thanks.”

“You don’t want a souvenir? You hit the bull’s-eye, pal. Your wife is going to be impressed.”

“All right, sure,” Will said, taking it. He figured he’d toss it on the way home.

“So when’s our next session, cowboy?” Randall had taken out a little black book and a ballpoint pen.

“I think one’s probably enough,” Will said.

“Lots more to learn.”

“I’ll see how it goes,” Will said. “I might not need another lesson.”