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see this, they might well flee the range.
    Eight rounds fired, eight holes punched in the black of the target. Empty magazine out, full one in, another eight rounds fired in rapid succession. Unload, reload. When all four magazines were empty he replaced the target with a fresh one, this one at twenty-five yards. The ritual — Peake could think of nothing else to call it — was repeated, and repeated again at thirty yards.
    When it was done, silence fell on the range, eerie in the wake of gunfire’s roar. Peake saw that only once — at thirty yards — had the shooter hit anywhere but the black center of the target.
    “I knew I was looking at a professional,” Peake told his wife that night.
    “You mean a cop?” she asked.
    “No. A professional.”
    What Peake thought, as he watched the man pack up his gear: God help whoever ends up on the other side of this guy’s gun, because nothing else will.
    And yet the shooter gave Peake a nice smile, wished him good day, and was out the door. Peake watched as the shooter got into his car, a generic sedan. There was a curious expression on the shooter’s face; resolute, anticipatory, strangely gentle.
    * * *
    S ean turned on the television when he arrived back at the house, put it on the 24-hour news channel. He lowered the volume to a dull murmur, trusting selective perception to call his attention to the television at the right moment.
    It was most unlike him. Under normal circumstances his television was little more than a glorified monitor for his DVD player; he had watched a lot of movies over the last four years, and his home theater system was the one luxury in an otherwise spartan house. Under normal circumstances he paid little attention to TV or print news; he knew too much about the way things really worked to trust the media’s account of world events.
    But these were not normal circumstances, had not been since that day now nearly three weeks ago when he’d watched the firefighter carry the girl away from the bombed building. Sean had sat in front of his television, touching the screen as if he could reach through time and space and offer something — a word of comfort, a soothing touch. Anything. The cameras followed the girl and the firefighter as he carried her to the rescue area, followed her as she was put on a stretcher and carried to one of the vans taking the less seriously injured to the hospitals. That was the last the world saw of her, for a while.
    He’d forsworn his movies, and kept the TV tuned to the cable news channel in hope of learning more about her. Instead of merely subscribing to the paper to preserve the illusion that he was an ordinary suburbanite, he actually read it, or at least skimmed through it. Eventually, buried like rough jewels in the mass of wild speculations and human interest drivel, Sean found the details he needed. Jennifer Thomson, twenty-eight, a receptionist in the grants department, the only survivor of that department.
    There had been one glimpse of her since then. Nine days after the incident, a TV camera caught her as she stood talking with a pregnant Hispanic woman. Caught Jennifer as she and the pregnant woman embraced, and he burned her image into his mind. Hair that dishwater shade between brown and blonde, eyes blue. Thinner now, if she didn’t start eating something soon she’d be a scarecrow. Stunned, still, by everything.
    She had no idea that the whole world had been watching; that was clear when the reporter walked up to her and spoke her name. There was no mistaking the confusion in her eyes, the realization that she was no longer a person but a symbol.
    Sean wondered how much Jennifer knew, not just about the photo of herself but the number of people who’d died. When he saw the other woman — they had the same eyes, perhaps they were sisters — gently guide her away he knew that Jennifer had, rightly or wrongly, been shielded from the worst of the knowledge. But that shield could not last