Dead or Alive

ways, past the end of the counter, beside the back door.

Jack scanned for movement but saw nothing, so he stepped out, gun raised to near shoulder height, eyes scanning, gun barrel following, then crept into the kitchen. Ahead and to the right was an archway, this one leading to the living room, he assumed, picturing the layout in his head. Dominic should be coming through the other room on the right to link up with him-

“Jack, rear bedroom window!” Dominic shouted from somewhere deeper inside the house. “Got a runner! Out the side window! White male, red jacket, armed… I’m on him!”

Jack resisted the impulse to charge ahead, instead moving slow and steady, clearing the remainder of the kitchen, then peeking around the corner into the living room. Clear. He stepped to the patio door, body aligned to the left of the doorjamb and hopefully behind the wooden 2?4 studs under the drywall that would, in theory, stop or slow down any bullets meant for him, then ducked down to peer out the porthole-style window into the alley beyond. To his right he saw a figure moving down the alley: blue windbreaker, yellow letters. Dominic’s FBI windbreaker. Jack opened the door, looked again, then pushed open the screen door. Directly across from him was a darkened doorway in the brick wall; to his left a green Dumpster. He moved that way, gun up, tracking for targets. He saw a shadow moving in the doorway and pivoted in time to see a man-shaped silhouette appear on the threshold.

“Freeze! Don’t move, don’t move!” he shouted, but the figure kept moving, left arm coming into the light, hand holding a revolver. “Drop it!” Jack shouted again, gave him another beat, then fired twice, both shots striking center mass. The figure fell back into the doorway. Jack turned again, back toward the Dumpster, moving until he could see around its corner, looking for-

And then something slammed into his back, between the shoulder blades, and he staggered forward. He felt the blood rush to his head and thought, Ah, shit, goddamn it… He bounced against the Dumpster, left shoulder taking the brunt of the impact, and tried to pivot on his heel toward the source of the gunfire… He felt another round slam into his side, just below his armpit, and knew it was too late.

“Hold!” a voice shouted over a bullhorn, followed by three rapid whistle blasts that echoed down the alley. “Cease exercise, cease exercise!”

“Ah, man…” Jack muttered, then leaned back against the Dumpster and exhaled heavily.

The man who’d just shot him-Special Agent Walt Brandeis-stepped out of the doorway and shook his head sadly. “My God. To die like that, son, with a green paint splatter in the middle of your back…” Jack could see the half-smile playing across Brandeis’s lips as he looked Jack up and down, then clicked his tongue. “It’s just a plain shame, that’s what it is.”

Down the alley, Dominic came jogging around the corner and stopped in his tracks, then said, “Again?”

Here’s the problem, Jack: You were-”

“Hurrying, I know.”

“No, not this time. It’s more than that. Hurrying wasn’t your real problem-it was part of it but not really what got you killed. Care to take a guess?”

Jack Junior thought it over a moment. “I assumed.”

“Damn right you assumed. You assumed the target you saw in that door was the only one in there. You assumed you’d put him down, then stopped worrying about it. It’s what I call Ambush Relief Syndrome. You won’t find it in the textbooks, but it goes like this: You survived an ambush, a real near thing, and you feel like you’re golden. In your head you subconsciously relabeled that door and the room inside from ‘uncleared’ to ‘cleared.’ Now, if this was real life and there had been two of them in there, your average dumb criminal probably would’ve opened up on you the moment his partner did, but there are always exceptions out 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 cliche 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 edges, but you’ve got great instincts. What, you been holding out on us? Do some training with the Secret Service when you were a kid? Maybe a few vacations with Clark and Chavez?”

Jack shook his head. “No, none of that. I mean, yeah, I shot some guns but nothing like this. I don’t know… It