John Gilstrap - Damage Control

“And you got your hands on the NSA version,” Dom said, connecting the dots.

Venice gave a demure smile. “Well, it’s not the very latest,” she said. “But it’s better than what the FBI can use.”

“Pesky warrants and such?” Dom asked.

“Exactly. The Constitution really gets in the way of prying into people’s business.”

Dom got the irony.

“Okay, here,” Venice said, pointing. “The program has analyzed the digital recording-it has to be digital for it to work-and separated out what it believes are separate sources of sound. Once separated, it breaks it into separate channels and then scrubs it. The scrubbing process takes a lot of the character out of the voices, but the words should be understandable.”

She tapped the lines on the screen. “This one is obviously the sound of the gunshots,” she said. “You can tell from the peaks in the noise.”

Dom nodded because he knew it was the best thing. In reality, they all looked the same to him.

“I think this one is Gail,” she said. She typed something on her keyboard, clicked her mouse twice, and the lines on the screen turned into sounds from her speakers.

Tristan hated guns. It wasn’t a political thing, although when he turned eighteen and got to cast a vote that counted, he was going to do his best to outlaw the damn things throughout the world. They were ugly and heavy, and they stank. Literally, they smelled bad, an odd combination of oil and must.

The Big Guy-honestly, speaking of stupid names, that one reset the bar-seemed less than happy to be giving Tristan his firearms class. He’d handed Tristan one of the weird-looking Mexican rifles, along with one of the box things that hung from the underside to hold the bullets, but without any actual bullets. Fifteen or twenty feet away, Scorpion seemed thoroughly engaged in a telephone conversation.

“Okay, kid, listen up,” Big Guy said. Then he caught himself. “Sorry. I meant to say Tristan. T-R-I-S-T-A-N.” He smiled, Tristan’s first indication that the man had a non-abusive side to his sense of humor. They’d stopped in the middle of the jungle and pulled the Pathfinder into a thicket of foliage that camouflaged it, though not to the point of invisibility. They’d already refilled the gas tank, and now, as far as he could tell, they were killing time.

Big Guy continued, “The first and most important lesson about firearms is this-the little round hole in the front points only at the enemy. Never at your own face, never at your feet, never at your friend, and, by God, never at me. Any questions so far?”

Big Guy held one of the bigger guns-an M16, Tristan thought, but that was only because he’d seen the movie Platoon — and in his hands, the rifle looked more like a big pistol, and apparently weighed nothing. Tristan’s gun, on the other hand, weighed more than he’d anticipated. He had no questions yet because he hadn’t really learned anything yet.

Big Guy held up the bullet holder thing. “This is the magazine,” he said. “If we get into a shootout, your survival may well depend on how quickly you’re able to switch these things out.”

“Whoa,” Tristan interrupted. “I’m not shooting at anybody.”

The Big Guy’s eyes flashed anger, and then they flashed patronizing tolerance. “Just humor me, okay?” he said. “My boss wants me to teach you this shit.”

When he actually waited for a response, Tristan gave a shrug that meant, Okay.

For the next twenty minutes, Big Guy showed him how to aim the rifle by pressing it into his shoulder, and then how to change the magazines without looking. While shooting, you just raised your trigger finger to stroke the little button, and the magazine fell away. Then, apparently, you could just grab another magazine and slap it into the old one’s place without looking. Big Guy made it look like the easiest thing in the world, but Tristan had a hard time getting the hang of it.

“Why do I need to learn this?” Tristan asked. “I’m not a killer. I couldn’t shoot another human being.”

“I hear that a lot from people who haven’t been shot yet,” Big Guy said. “Again, just humor me.”

From there, Big Guy showed him how to shove as many bullets as possible into the magazine. For his gun, three of the magazines took thirty bullets, but two of them took only fifteen. On full-auto, all of those magazines combined would give him eight seconds of total firepower.

“Fire one shot at a time,” Big Guy said. “One bullet per trigger pull. Even though these are machine guns, and they’re capable of putting hundreds of rounds downrange, I want you to think of your rifle as a single-shot weapon. Questions?”

“Yeah,” Tristan said. “Who will we be shooting at?”

“I have no idea,” Big Guy said. “But I can tell you this-if you’re shooting at them, it will be because they shot at you first. Once you cross that line, a lot of the rest won’t matter. The priority will be to conserve ammunition. Between the various weapons, I figure we have between twenty-five hundred and three thousand rounds. That sounds like a lot, but you’d be surprised at how fast that gets used up.”

“Are you going to actually teach me how to shoot this gun?” Tristan asked.

The Big Guy looked confused. “I already told you about the safety,” he said. “You take that off, and then you point the little round hole toward the bad guy and you pull the trigger. For you, though, the lesson is to keep the friggin’ safety on.”

Venice had guessed right, but Dom found the changes in the voice to be unsettling. It was as if the machine had taken Gail’s voice apart and stripped away the humanity. The other sounds in the room-everything from the gunshots to the other voices-were completely unintelligible. They reminded Dom of someone moaning into a galvanized tube. The overall effect was beyond unnerving.

They listened to Gail’s conversation with Venice, and they heard the long, soothing shh that she’d uttered to Harriett. Then the real bedlam started. Above the muffled cacophony, Gail’s altered voice yelled, “The guard named Volpe from downstairs! Another white male, six feet, mid-thirties, slender! Black male-”

And that was it. Her voice was cut off, even as the rest of the noise continued to pound in the background.

“She described her attackers,” Venice said. Her expression showed that she was somewhere between impressed and amazed.

“More than that,” Dom said. “She named one of them. Somebody named Volpe. A Crystal Palace security guard. Are the other descriptions enough to be useful? A young slender white male and a black male? Between the two, she described half the world and three quarters of Scottsdale.” Even as he spoke the words, he had trouble wrapping his head around such a non-emotional discussion of harm against Gail.

Tears returned to Venice’s eyes and she started typing again, perhaps just to mask the emotion. “No coincidences,” she said. “That means that Volpe and some guy named Hainsley both have something in common with somebody named Abrams.”

As Dom watched her do her best to be brave and professional, his already-massive admiration for her grew even larger. She’d known Digger from the day she was born, grown up in the same house as the daughter of his family’s housekeeper. She’d endured his Army years, been there for his marriage and divorce, and had been a friend through the ordeal of his ex-wife’s violent death. Now she was working hard to save Digger’s life, even as she knew that the second love of his life had likely been killed.

“I don’t think you should tell Dig about Gail,” Dom said.

She looked up.

“You know, when he calls in.”

“I can’t lie to him,” she said. “I won’t lie to him. I owe him that much.”