LITMIR.BIZ

       3

      Shepherd stepped out of the front door of the townhouse into the teeth of a westerly wind straight off Chesapeake Bay and headed away along Main Street.

      Hogan’s Alley covered ten acres of the Marine Base in Quantico and was built as a microcosm of any-town America with its own bank, drug store, hotel, gas station – basically all the institutions criminals targeted out in the real world. Normally, the whole town echoed with radio buzz, shouted orders and the crackle of gunfire from FBI, DEA and other assorted law-enforcement officers as they learnt the art of urban tactical deployment. Today it was almost deserted, like everywhere else, as the whole base wound down for the Christmas holidays. Shepherd noticed a stuffed Santa dangling from an upper window of the Coin-Op Laundromat swinging in the strengthening wind like a hanged man. Someone had shot him in the ass with a paint-round: so much for the Christmas spirit.

      He hunched his shoulders against the chill and looked up at the night sky out of habit. The evening star had already risen in the west and, as he looked at it, a huge flock of geese streaked across the sky, their loud honks making him pause. The ancients would have read much into the direction of the birds’ flight and the position of the wandering star in the sky. But Shepherd knew it was just nature and that the shifting star was actually the planet Venus whose brightness had always been a comfort to him, even in his most desperate and lonely nights.

      He turned the corner just as the streetlights flickered on in response to the creep of night. At the far end of the block, more light leaked on to the sidewalk from the foyer of The Biograph, named after the movie theatre in Chicago where John Dillinger had been gunned down in the mid-thirties. The marquee above the entrance advertised Manhattan Melodrama starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy, the last movie Dillinger had ever seen. Shepherd reached the unmanned ticket booth and pushed through the door into the space where the foyer should have been.

      The classroom held a hundred students seated in concentric rows around a large screen that could be patched in to a number of audio-visual teaching aids as well as any of the sixty-two security cameras set up around the town. Right now it was showing the basement room of the townhouse with Shepherd in the middle of it, frozen in his two-handed stance, his gun pointing at the crumpled bodies on the floor. A man in a black suit stood before the screen, head to one side as if studying an exhibit in an art gallery. ‘You see a ghost in there, Shepherd?’ he asked without looking round.

      ‘No, sir, I was just … it was a high-pressure situation.’

      The man turned and gave Shepherd the same hard scrutiny he’d been giving the screen. ‘They’re all high-pressure situations, son – every one of ’em.’

      Special Agent Benjamin Franklin was one of two active field counsellors permanently attached to Shepherd’s class, there to give a practical dimension to each lesson, answer any questions and tell the new intake how it really was out in the real world. He was one of those solid, square-jawed types seemingly minted in a different time when men still called women Ma’am and cars were covered in fins and chrome. His short blond hair was receding and fading to ash above pale blue eyes like chips of ice that somehow still managed to convey warmth whenever he smiled, which he did now. ‘Might I ask,’ he said, ‘would you fire again, given the same scenario?’ His Carolina drawl gave his words a slow courtliness.

      Shepherd thought back to the blur of action as he’d squeezed the trigger, the suspect in his sights but the wrong person ending up dead on the floor. ‘No, sir.’

      ‘How do you figure that?’

      ‘Because … because I hit the hostage.’

      Franklin started up the aisle towards him, buttoning the jacket of his suit and flashing an old, steel Timex. ‘Take off your body armour, Shepherd, and walk with me a while.’

      The night seemed darker after the brightness of the classroom and the wind had picked up. It was blowing leaves down the street and into Shepherd’s face as he fell into step beside Franklin.

      ‘’Bout twelve years back,’ Franklin said, peering at the darkening forest ahead as if he could see the lost years among the trees, ‘I was part of a six-man task force running an investigation into a string of hit-and-run bank jobs across the Ohio–Indiana state line. In each case a lone, masked gunman stormed into a small out-of-the-way bank, grabbed a hostage – always a woman – and threatened to shoot her if anyone tripped an alarm. He was smart to a point because the size of the banks meant security wasn’t top of the line so we didn’t have any decent security camera footage. Also he never got greedy so was always out and away within a couple of minutes. And he always took the hostage with him, saying if he heard so much as a car alarm he would kill her.

      ‘As you can imagine the local press shook up a hornets’ nest of fear about it all but there was also a bigger concern: none of the hostages were coming forward afterwards. For about a week or so we lived in fear of getting a call from some hunter or dog walker who had stumbled upon the silenced corpse of one of our unfortunate bank customers. Then he hit another bank, third in a month, and we got fresh footage.’

      Franklin directed Shepherd away from Hogan’s Alley and towards the path through the forest that led to the main building complex beyond.

      ‘This is how it went down. Woman walks into the bank, talks to the door guard; gunman comes in and disarms the guard while he’s distracted, grabs the woman, robbery ensues then perp leaves with a hostage. We could see by comparing the clear images of the new footage with the fuzzy older stuff we had that it was the same woman every time. Turns out she wasn’t a hostage at all, she was one of the crew. That’s why no one was coming forward afterwards.

      ‘We quietly spread the word among the state banks, so when they pulled another job ten days later in Des Moines, a teller tripped the alarm and the cops got there in plenty of time to pick ’em up. When he was cornered the gunman tried to pull the same hostage routine, said he was going to kill her if they didn’t give him a car and a free pass. Cops just told him, “Go ’head, shoot her.” All of which brings us back to your little situation. Tell me what you knew about your suspect from the mission brief?’