ONE
Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness.
—MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book II
CHAPTER THREE
Manhattan
Francis Xavier Byrne had a choice: the .38 or the 9-millimeter?
It was the same choice that every senior officer in the New York City Police Department had to make every year, a choice not given to the grunts, to the junior officers, to the rank and file, but to only a select few, those with seniority and experience.
He had earned that right. Earned it long ago and continued it every day he spent on the force. And every year, when this moment rolled around at the Police Academy on E. 20th Street, Captain Francis Xavier Byrne made the same choice:
He took the .38 Colt Detective Special.
As he raised the weapon into firing position, sighting on the first of the targets, he took a moment to reflect. He was 51 years old now and most definitely old school. No matter how many times he fired the various 9 mms. the department authorized, he still preferred the security and heft of a revolver. The Glock 19 was a plastic piece of shit with a six-pound pull—not the thing for some frightened rookie to be wielding in a crisis—and even retrofitted with a twelve-pound-pull “NY-2 Trigger,” it still felt like a lethal toy gun. The Smith & Wesson 5946 and the Sig P226 were improvements, although not by much. Byrne and his men also had the option of carrying the Kahr K9s as backup pieces or off-duty weapons, but in his opinion, unless the brass was willing to admit the past century of semi-automatic firearms technology was a mistake and get some old-fashioned Colt 1911s, he was going to stick to the trusty revolver as his sidearm until they pried it from his cold, dead hands.
He slid his right index finger down the frame from just below the cylinder toward the trigger. That was the way they taught it now at the Academy: no fingers on the triggers until you were ready to fire. Until you were ready to shoot. Until you were ready to kill.
Byrne brought the Colt up to eye level. He used a one-handed, full-frontal stance, right eye closed, his dominant left eye sighting down the barrel. Not for him was the sideways stance, in which you were essentially aiming over your shoulder. Not for him was any flashy, muzzle-waving, sideways-pointing ghetto grip: throughout his career, he had several times staked his life on the proposition that the safest place to stand between a gangbanger with a Glock and whatever he was shooting at was right in front of the target.
Fuck it: it didn’t feel natural. The whole “finger on the side of the gun” crap was a “safety” rule—for the perp’s safety, not the cop’s. He dropped his finger onto the trigger, let it curl around the trigger in a lover’s caress. There was next to no chance of a double-action revolver going off accidentally, or even of a bed-wetting patrolman jerking the trigger hard enough by accident to fire the weapon.
Byrne let out his breath, then held it. Despite the noise of the range all around him, only partly muffled by his protective ear wear, he always felt at peace here. It was so unlike real life: just you and the target, standing there motionless, a big bull’s-eye at its center, dangling twenty feet away, just begging you to shoot it. Of course, it wasn’t really shooting. It was just punching holes, very quickly, through a piece of paper. But it still felt good, and the fact that there was no return fire was a bonus.
Byrne pulled back the hammer: now the weapon had a hair trigger. He fired and punched a hole near the center of the target, just slightly to the left. Each year, as he requalified, his astigmatism got a little worse, and each year he had to learn to compensate for it a little more. Some of the men—Vinnie Mancuso, his old partner back in the days when they were both young and hungry, now working in Commissioner White’s office and about ready to start pulling his pension as he counted down the days—suggested that he wear his glasses to the range, but to Byrne that was like making love with them on. You didn’t really need to see what you were doing as long as you knew what it was and how to do it.
He compensated a little to the left and fired again. Closer; good enough for government work. Not good enough for him. Another slight shift, another shot: perfect.
“You’re getting old, Frankie,” shouted a voice off to his left. With his headgear on, the voice to Byrne was like a whisper. He didn’t have to turn or look to know who it was.
“Move ’em back another fifteen, Lannie,” he barked. “And this time make it hard.”
Aslan “Lannie” Saleh stifled the crack he almost made. Something about “old” and “hard.” After all, Capt. Byrne was his boss, the man who had given him his break, and even though the unit operated more or less full-time in politically incorrect mode, Lannie Saleh knew that for Frankie Byrne the shooting range was the next best thing to St. Michael’s on Easter Sunday. He knew better than to break the boss’s sacramental concentration.
Lannie said nothing as he hit the 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
