Chapter 6
Conscious, uninjured, looking at the ceiling of the gym with the expression of a man whose understanding of the next several minutes has just been substantially reorganized.
The gym was completely quiet.
Olivia stepped back. She was not out of breath. She did not look at the operators or the crowd or the clock on the wall. She looked at Cross, who was sitting up with the careful deliberateness of a man taking an inventory of himself.
She reached into the pocket of her training pants and removed a folded piece of paper, which she placed on the mat beside him.
"That's the report," she said. "Three days of observation. Technique assessment is in the first section — your fundamental mechanics are genuinely excellent, and that's documented accurately. The second section covers the instructional approach. The deputy director will want it by Friday."
Cross looked at the paper. He looked at her.
He had the specific expression of a man who is processing two things simultaneously that do not fit into the same frame — the physical experience of the last thirty seconds and the information contained in those two sentences. The processing was visible on his face because he was not a man who had developed extensive practice at hiding it. He had never needed to.
Master Sergeant Cole had moved closer without anyone noticing him move. He was looking at the paper with a different quality of attention — the recognition of someone who has, in a slower and less dramatic way, been observing the same thing Olivia had been observing, and who had not had the authority or the mechanism to document it.
May you like
"Who sent you?" Cross said. Not hostile. The hostility had gone somewhere else, into some other processing track. This was an actual question.
"Deputy Director's office, DIA training division." She said it the way she said everything — without emphasis, as information. "The site requested an external combatives assessment eight months ago. I'm the assessor."
