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control button and dragged the shredded target forward. Everybody kidded everybody in the Counter-Terrorism Unit about their marksmanship, but over fifty or not, Capt. Byrne was still the best shot in the department. There were all sorts of stories about him; about the time when he had caught a burglar in his mother’s apartment in Queens and, without even looking, had put a bullet in the man and knocked him through a window.
    Lannie pinched up a paper bad guy and sent it fleeing into the distance. Twenty-five feet, thirty, thirty-five—
    “Keep going.”
    He stopped at fifty. Byrne was reloading. Lannie admired the way the boss so smoothly, so effortlessly, slipped the .38 cartridges into the cylinder, then snapped it into place with a flick of his wrist. That was something you weren’t supposed to do; you were supposed to politely shut the cylinder with your free hand. But Frankie Byrne was at heart an Irish cowboy, and his men loved him for it.
    “What did you say?” shouted Byrne. Saleh shook his head: nothing. Jesus, the man really was a mind reader, just like everybody said.
    Byrne turned back toward the target and let out his breath. Instead of holding it this time, he kept exhaling; instead of cocking the hammer and firing single-action, he fired double-action, each pull of the trigger doing double duty, each pull cocking the hammer and then releasing it. Six shots. Lannie didn’t even have to look at the target as he reeled it back in to know the extent of the damage.
    The first shot, he knew, would be right in the bad guy’s head; the other five were just for show. Or, knowing Byrne, to make a point. In the CTU, setting a good example and, from time to totally unreported time, creating an object lesson for the mother of some son of a bitch back home in Amman, was simply good manners.
    Byrne grunted as he looked at his handiwork. Head, heart, stomach, spleen, balls, and, for good measure, a kneecap. Mission accomplished. “Your turn,” he said.
    Lannie felt his heart drop into his shoes. He hadn’t come prepared to shoot, and certainly hadn’t expected to perform in front of the boss. Byrne slapped the protective earmuffs on his head and thrust the Glock into his hand. “You’re good to go,” he said.
    The new target rocketed out. The book said that most sidearm confrontations took place from point-blank range to no more than twenty-five feet, but Byrne had just sent Osama bin Laden flapping in the breeze at least ten meters.
    Lannie took the pistol and tried to steady himself. Even though he had already qualified this year, it didn’t matter: Byrne could fire him at any moment for any reason. The CTU was the most highly regarded and hard to get into unit in the NYPD, and the most top-down in its hierarchy; its members didn’t have to answer to any civilian review board, fat-bottomed top brass, or even the mayor. Once, shortly after 9/11, some deputy chief had tried to insert one of his stooges into the CTU’s secret headquarters, which in those dark days were in Brooklyn. Byrne, or so the story went, marched down to One Police Plaza and threatened to put the dope’s head through one of the double-glazed windows on the fourteenth floor; and since Frankie and Commissioner Matt White had been partners in the old days, that was the end of departmental interference in the CTU.
    Lannie took a deep breath of pride—pride in his unit and pride in what he had already accomplished just getting into it—and squeezed off nine shots in lightning succession. Three hits, six misses, but at this distance that was pretty good, good enough for government work.
    “You shoot like a sand nigger,” said Byrne, inspecting the target. “No wonder you guys always lose.”
    Had anyone else said that to him, Lannie would have brought him up on charges; from Byrne, it was a compliment. “You know, I could have your badge for a crack like that, Captain,” he ventured.
    Byrne laughed. “Which is one of the things