Chapter 11
Quinlan glanced down at his trainee who was currently staring with rapt attention at the gun in his hand. He lifted the weapon to Sabrina’s eye level, wishing he was more certain that she was ready for this. He wasn’t. But it was time.
“This weapon is-”
“A semiautomatic.40 caliber Glock 22. Full-size with controllable recoil, a barrel length of 4 and 5/8 inches and weight of approximately 25.67 ounces,” Sabrina interrupted him. “I sort of memorized all the major gun models used by most government agents. Want me to tell you about the SIG-Sauer-”
“This weapon is-” he continued undaunted.
“Lightweight. Manageable. And takes a standard ten-round magazine. I know. But let me ask you this. What with us being CIA agents-”
“You’re not an agent yet,” Quinlan corrected her.
“Whatever. I’m just saying. In keeping with the spirit of things, don’t you think we should be buying American?”
“I think you, on your first day of small arms weapon training, should shut up.”
“Touchy, touchy,” she tisked.
Quinlan breathed deeply trying to find some patience. He had no doubt he was going to need it. “That might be because I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. One guess as to why.”
“Madonna?”
“Is that who that was?” he wondered.
“She’s going through this transitional phase. It’s really powerful. Sometimes you’ve just got to crank it. You know?”
He didn’t bother to question that, fearing it would make him seem older than he truly was. Instead, he pulled her hand toward his and placed the gun in her flattened palm.
“Let’s start with basic target practice. There is a target twenty feet out directly in front of you. Can you see it?”
They were standing together in a single cube of an indoor shooting range that was part of the Langley complex. Targets were at various different distances for each cube. They each wore safety goggles along with a set of ear protectors that would muffle the report of the gun while still allowing them to hear each other when they spoke. Muffled sounds of guns going off came from the far right of them, but there were at least three empty cubes on either side of them.
Quinlan hadn’t wanted her to be intimidated by the other agents’ accuracy.
“Yep. Only it’s twenty feet, four and a half inches.”
“Freak,” he accused, but with no acidity so she didn’t flinch. He’d called her that so often by now she’d grown used to the title. It was practically an endearment.
“Sorry,” she replied with a shrug of her shoulders. Though he knew she wasn’t. Not really.
“There is an outline of a head and chest. For now I want you to concentrate only on getting the shot inside the outlined figure. Here’s what you want to do.”
Quinlan stepped behind her and paused. Then he pushed forward, forcing himself to go through the motions he would have taken with any other student.
He moved behind her, placed his arms over hers, his hands gripping each of her wrists. To brace her for the impact that was to come, he pushed his whole body against her back, his knees just brushing the back of her knees. He heard her breathing pick up. He felt her body tense. Enough that he felt compelled to ask, “Nervous?”
She exhaled between her lips before she answered, “No.”
A few tendrils of hair escaped from the headset she wore and brushed against his cheek, distracting him. “Next time pull your hair back.”
She nodded, but it only caused her hair to caress his cheek even more. Focusing on the lesson, he gritted his teeth against the softness and the smell. Lavender.
“You don’t want to pull or jerk the trigger. You want to squeeze it in your hand, absorbing the recoil as it happens. You’re not going to be prepared for the power of the…”
The shot went off before he finished his instruction and he bit back a curse. “This is becoming a problem, Sabrina.”
She turned her head, lifting her safety goggles up over her eyes, and giving him a cheeky smile. “Premature firing? No one has ever complained before.”
His steady gaze conveyed his displeasure. Her tendency to jump the gun, literally, was beginning to become an issue. And this wasn’t the first time he’d addressed it.
“Whatever,” she harrumphed in response to his non-reply. “I bet the money you lost to me the other night that I got him right between the eyes.”
Quinlan hit a button on the side of the cube, drawing the paper figure closer to see exactly where she landed the shot.
It wasn’t quite between the eyes, but it was close.
“I didn’t account enough for the reverberation in my hands after the explosion,” she said glancing at the target. “Don’t hold me this time. Let me try it on my own.”
“I wasn’t holding you. I was steadying you,” he retorted. But he stayed to the left of her and hit the button to send the target back.
He watched her brace her legs apart to prepare herself for the impact. Then she tilted her head and studied the target for a moment. He wondered what she was seeing, how the world looked to a person who could accurately tell at a glance the distance between two objects, when suddenly she fired off three more rounds.
By the time the target reached them they could both see that she had created a significant hole in the location that would be between a man’s eyes. All three shots hit almost exactly the same spot.
“Cool,” she whispered. “I knew I would be good at this.”
“Why?”
She hesitated for a moment because he knew the probing irritated her. As a rule, she didn’t like to answer those types of questions. Using her abilities was fine. Being challenged to see how far she could push them didn’t bother her. But when she had to explain them, or dissect them, she invariably froze.
It reminded him that, although she may tolerate being called a freak, it didn’t mean she wasn’t sensitive about it. Too bad, he thought. She didn’t have those kinds of choices anymore. “Why?” he prodded. “It’s important Sabrina. We need to understand so we know exactly what you’re capable of.”
“It’s the spatial thing,” she answered finally. “And physics and geometry and I don’t know.” She lifted her hands up in a helpless gesture and Quinlan moved in to remove the weapon from her grip.
She grimaced; obviously realizing that she’d forgotten the gun was still in her hand.
“Go on,” he encouraged her.
“I can estimate the speed and the trajectory of the bullet coming out of the barrel based on the length of the barrel, the drag of the ballistics and everything else I remember from the textbooks about the science of shooting. I can see the exact distance between here and the target. Put it all together and I know exactly where the gun needs to be pointed in order to hit what I aim at. It’s just a question of keeping my hands still and, like you said, absorbing the recoil. I have really steady hands.”
Quinlan nodded. “Since target practice is beyond you, we’ll try another exercise.” He hit another button next to the one that controlled the target’s distance and a raised platform came up from the floor. It basically looked like an oversize pinwheel, with pictures attached to each spoke.
“The target is going to spin,” he explained. “It will stop randomly on a picture. You’ve got to determine if the target is a threat and fire. If you hear this-” a buzzer sounded above their heads “-it means you took too long on a target that was a threat and you were shot. Ready?”
She nodded.
Quinlan hit the button again and set the target in motion. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. Her processing powers were extraordinary as she methodically identified each target and either held her fire or took
