"Good luck," he said.
Reacher sat still for a moment. He was more nervous than he should have been. He breathed in and held it and felt the thrill of caffeine in his veins. Just a tiny microscopic tremble. Four fast cups of strong coffee were not an ideal preparation for accurate long-distance shooting.
But it was only three hundred yards. Three hundred yards, with a good rifle, no heat, no cold, still air. More or less the same thing as pressing the muzzle into the center of the target and pulling the trigger. He could do it with his eyes closed. There was no fundamental problem with the marksmanship. The problem was with the stakes. He wanted the puppet master more than he had wanted the Marines' cup all those years before. A lot more. He didn't know why. But that was the problem.
He breathed out. It was only three hundred yards. Not six. Not eight. Not a thousand. No big deal.
He slid out of the Humvee and took the rifle off the back seat. Carried it across rough earth to the coconut mat. Placed it gently with its bipod feet a yard back from the edge. Bent down and loaded it. Stepped back behind it and lined himself up and crouched, knelt, lay full length. He snuggled the stock into his shoulder. Eased his neck left and right and looked around. It felt like he was alone in the middle of nowhere. He ducked his head. Closed his left eye and moved his right eye to the scope. Draped his left hand over the barrel and pressed down and back. Now he had a tripod mount. The bipod, and his shoulder. Solid. He spread his legs and turned his feet out so they were flat on the mat. Drew his left leg up a little and dug the sole of his shoe into the mat's fibers so the deadweight of the limb anchored his position. He relaxed and let himself sprawl. He knew he must look like a guy who had been shot, instead of a guy preparing to shoot.
He gazed through the scope. Saw the hypervivid image of great optics. He acquired the target. It looked close enough to touch. He laid the reticle where the two strokes of the X met. Squeezed the slack out of the trigger. Relaxed. Breathed out. He could feel his heart. It felt like it was loose in his chest. The caffeine was buzzing in his veins. The reticle was dancing over the X. It was hopping and jerking, left and right, up and down, in a tiny random circle.
He closed his right eye. Willed his heart to stop. Breathed out and kept his lungs empty, one second, two. Then again, in, out, hold. He pulled all his energy downward, into his gut. Let his shoulders slacken. Let his muscles relax. Let himself settle. He opened his eye again and saw that the reticle was still. He stared at the target. Feeling it. Wanting it. He pulled the trigger. The gun kicked and roared and the muzzle blast blew a cloud of dust out of the coconut mat and obscured his view. He lifted his head and coughed once and ducked back to the scope.
Bull's-eye.
The X was gone. There was a neat hole drilled through the center of it, leaving only four tiny ballpoint ticks visible, one at the top and one at the bottom of each stroke. He coughed again and pushed back and stood up. Cash dropped down in his place and used the scope to check the result.
"Good shooting," he said.
"Good rifle," Reacher said.
Cash operated the bolt and the spent case fell out on the mat. He got to his knees and picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then he stood up and carried the rifle back toward the Humvee.
"So do I qualify?" Reacher called after him.
"For what?"
"For talking to."
Cash turned around. "You think this was a test?"
"I sincerely hope it was."
"You might not want to hear what I've got to say."
"Try me," Reacher said.
Cash nodded. "We'll talk in the office."
They detoured up the length of the range for Cash to retrieve the target. Then they turned and drove back to the huts. They passed the pickup guys. They were still blasting away. Cash parked and they went inside and Cash filed Reacher's target in a drawer, under R for Richardson. Then he danced his fingers forward to B for Barr and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper.
"You looking to show your old buddy didn't do it?" he asked.
"He wasn't my buddy," Reacher said. "I knew him once, is all."
"And?"
"I don't remember him being that great a shooter."
"TV news said it was pretty short range."
"With moving targets and deflection angles."
"TV said the evidence is pretty clear."
"It is," Reacher said. "I've seen it."
"Check these out," Cash said.
He dealt the filed targets like a deck of cards, all along the length of the counter. Then he butted them edge-to-edge and squared them off to make room for more. Then he started a second row, directly underneath the first. In the end he had thirty-two sheets of paper displayed, two long rows of repetitive concentric circles, all of them marked J. Barr, 300 yards , with times and dates stretching back three years.
"Read them and weep," Cash said.
Every single target showed an expert score.
Reacher stared at them, one after the other. Each inner ring was tightly packed with clean, crisp holes. Tight clusters, big and obvious. Thirty-two targets, ten rounds each, three hundred twenty rounds, all of them dead-on maximum scores.
"This is everything he did?" Reacher asked.
Cash nodded. "Like you said, I'm a record keeper."
"What gun?"
"His own Super Match. Great rifle."
"Did the cops call you?"
"Guy called Emerson. He was pretty decent about it. Because I've got to think about my own ass, because Barr trained here. I don't want to damage my professional reputation. I've put in a lot of work here, and this place could get a bad name."
Reacher scanned the targets, one more time. Remembered telling Helen Rodin: They don't forget.
"What about his buddy Charlie?" he asked.
"Charlie was hopeless by comparison."
Cash butted James Barr's targets into a pile and put them back in the B slot. Then he opened another drawer and ran his fingers back to S and took out another sheaf of paper.
"Charlie Smith," he said. "He was military too, by the look of him. But Uncle Sam's money didn't buy anything long-term there."
He went through the same routine, laying out Charlie's targets in two long rows. Thirty-two of them.
"They always showed up together?" Reacher asked.
"Like peanut butter and jelly," Cash said.
"Separate ranges?"
"Separate planets," Cash said.
Reacher nodded. In terms of numerical score Charlie's targets were much worse than James Barr's. Way worse. They were the product of a very poor shooter. One had just four hits, all of them outside the outer ring, one each in the quadrants in the corners. Across all thirty-two targets he had just eight hits inside the inner ring. One was a dead-on bull's-eye. Dumb luck, maybe, or wind or drift or a random thermal. Seven were very close to clipping the black. Apart from that, Charlie was all over the place. Most of his rounds must have missed altogether. Percentage-wise most of his hits happened in the white between the two outer rings. Low, low scores. But his hits weren't precisely random. There was a weird kind of consistency there. He was aiming, but he was missing. Maybe some kind of bad astigmatism in his eyes.
"What type of a guy was he?" Reacher asked.
"Charlie?" Cash said. "Charlie was a blank slate. Couldn't read him at all. If he had been a better shot, he'd have come close to frightening me."
"Small guy, right?"