Chapter 5

I opened the rifle case on the bench. Standard-issue precision rifle. Clean, cold, no history. A rifle with stories would have felt like another witness, like another source of pressure. This one had nothing to prove on its behalf, which was almost a relief.

I checked the weapon methodically. Scope. Bolt. Chamber. Stock. I did it slowly, not for performance, but because the check was what you did, and skipping it was the kind of shortcut that killed people at Ardent Ridge who were not me.

Harlan crossed his arms and said if I missed, the fantasy ended.

I looked at him. "And if I don't?"

His smile returned, thinner now. "Then we inspect the target."

A few men laughed because he did.

I loaded the single round. Felt it seat. Checked the disc on the distant post, still moving in the desert wind, still catching sun at irregular intervals, still swinging on its wire with the indifference of an object that did not know it was the center of something.

Then I heard it. From the range tower, a faint electronic click. The sound of a camera system activating. I knew that sound. I had been on ranges where recording was standard and ranges where it was not, and I understood the difference between documentation and evidence. This was the latter. Someone had arranged for the truth to happen in public, which meant someone else had arranged for a different truth to happen instead.

I dropped behind the rifle.

Set my cheek against the stock.

Adjusted for the brass disc's movement, its swing, the wind that was pulling it a predictable three degrees off center every four seconds.

And then the wind flags went dead.

All of them. Simultaneously. The pennants along the firing line that had been moving steadily in the Nevada morning simply stopped, as if the desert had inhaled and forgotten to exhale. Except that the brass disc on the distant post was still moving. Still swinging. Because the disc was exposed to actual wind, the real wind above the rocky rise, and someone had cut the range's mechanical wind-indicator system without affecting the conditions at the target.

The flags were the calibration tool. Without them, a shooter working from range wind indicators alone would have no accurate read on what the air was doing at distance.

I did not move from behind the rifle.

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I said, at a volume the range microphones would capture clearly: "Someone changed the wind system."

Silence.