Chapter 7
Rourke walked back to the ammo table and set down the clipboard he had picked up at some point during the sequence. Then he came back to where I was standing, beside the rifle case and the single spent casing I had not fired, and he looked at me with the expression of a man finishing an assessment he had begun before he set foot on the range that morning.
"You saw it before he gave the nod," he said.
"Yes."
"How."
"The technician was positioned wrong," I said. "He was standing to the left of the panel instead of behind it. People stand to the side of something they're about to touch, not something they're monitoring."
Rourke was quiet for a moment. Then he said: "At Ardent Ridge. The wind."
"There was a thermal off the south-facing rock. The air was moving in a counter-pattern to the surface indicators. I used the dust signature on the secondary ridge as my actual read."
"That's not in the report."
"No," I said. "The report documents the outcome. It doesn't document how I read the conditions."
He looked at me for a long time. Not the way Harlan had looked at me when I arrived, which was an assessment being performed for an audience. This was something else, the look of a man updating information against a new fact and finding the update significant.
"Why didn't you shoot?" he said.
"Because the sabotage was the test," I said. "Anyone who reads wind can hit a target. Not everyone sees the trap before it closes." I paused. "You didn't give me one round to make the shot, Chief. You gave me one round to see what I'd do when the shot was taken from me."
Rourke said nothing.
The desert wind moved across the range. The flags, restored now by the range technician under Kincaid's direct supervision, began moving again. The brass disc on the distant post swung in the same slow arc it had been swinging all morning.
"The Ardent Ridge shot," Rourke said finally. "The conditions."
May you like
"Bad," I said.
"Bad how?"
