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the only pistol on the trolley, and he missed the bull by a mile. Half an hour it went on like that, Trevanian blasting targets, getting a feel for the guns, while Lagundi sat watching, not saying a word. Finally only one target remained, a full-body. When Trevanian reracked the last gun, Darren invited Lagundi to step up and take a shot. Trevanian declined on her behalf.
    “Excuse me?” she said.
    He looked over his shoulder. “You don’t need to.”
    “I might want to.”
    “Well, do you?”
    His tone seemed to get to her. She rose, reached into her purse, and produced a Beretta.
    Trevanian made a face. “This isn’t personal shooting practice. If you want to fire something, at least make it count. Choose a weapon off the trolley.”
    She crossed to the firing bay. When Darren looked at me, I shrugged. As far as I was concerned she was a customer, she could do what she liked. Darren went and gave her some ear protection, and she clipped back her hair as he gave her the obligatory safety instructions.
    “Can she shoot?” I asked, moving to stand beside Trevanian, watching her.
    Trevanian bent over the trolley, reexamining the guns he’d been firing. He didn’t seem too pleased with her sudden display of independence. When Darren left her alone in the bay, Lagundi raised her pistol arm slowly and took aim like a sports shooter, like she knew which end of the gun meant business. Steadying herself, she sighted, then fired. Her gaze still fixed on the target, she let her arm fall.
    “Low,” Darren announced, peering through the binoculars. “Six inches.”
    She lifted her arm, then sighted and fired again.
    “Still low,” Darren told her, less certainly.
    She took aim a third time and fired. She didn’t wait for Darren’s verdict, she pumped three more bullets into the target, then ejected the empty magazine and returned to her chair. She took off the ear protection and starting rearranging her hair clips. Darren beckoned me across the bay to take a look through the binoculars. There were several white concentric circles on the head of the target, the bull’s-eye at the center. The circles were unmarked.
    “Below the bull,” Darren said. I adjusted my gaze downward and saw it immediately, a grouping as tight and neat as you could hope for. Six bullet holes punched clean through the throat.
    “Luck?” I wondered aloud.
    “At seventy-five yards?” Darren pursed his lips and turned his head.
    I contemplated the target a moment, the hairs prickling on my neck. Then I stood up and glanced over my shoulder. Trevanian was still at the trolley. Over on the chair, Lagundi’s pistol lay cooling by her purse. As she finished straightening her hair, her eye caught mine, and she smiled. Then she picked up the Beretta, dropped it into the purse, and told Trevanian it was time they were leaving. He rose, turning slowly from the trolley to face her. If looks could kill, she would have been dead.

CHAPTER 5
    “Lots of people shoot straight, they’re not all murderers,” Rita Durranti declared when I finished telling her about Trevanian and Lagundi’s visit to Haplon. “I’m more worried they were out at your plant so fast. They’re pushing this along like they’re in an awful hurry.”
    Rita was a senior Customs officer, the single point of contact between Hawkeye and the civilian world. She was the person Dimitri and I came to when we needed information or access to the confidential files that Customs kept on suspect arms shipments, and the range of lowlifes, weirdos, and downright dangerous people behind them. In return, and subject to clearance from Channon, we reciprocated with information that the Customs people were in no position to gather. A slightly built woman of Italian descent, Rita lowered her eyes as we walked.
    “I can’t believe you still want to go on with Hawkeye. Not after Dimitri—” She lifted a hand. Dimitri’s duplicity. His death. “I thought you had more brains. Honest to God, I