The range was warm. She ditched the sweatshirt and was down to a blue and gold UCLA T-shirt. Much more comfortable.

She hadn’t held the Glock for several weeks. It felt different in her hand, as if it were ready to fight her. She adopted the ungainly squat ting position that had been standard for shooters for the past several decades, raised the pistol in both hands, held it forward, and focused on the sights with her right eye; she didn’t close the left, but paid no attention to what it saw, not that anyone ever can aim a pistol in a quick draw combat situation.

Front sight. Front sight.

That was the key, one FBI instructor had told her once, the rock upon which the Church of Almighty Handguns was built. A shooter had to see the front sight and let the target remain hazy in the background.

Otherwise, might as well call in an air strike.

So, front sight, front sight.

In the notch of the rear sight, a frame, she saw the bull’s eye of the target.

Her hand was steady. She squeezed the trigger, fighting the temptation to flinch. Even under the headset, the blast of the weapon was frightful. The recoil was less than expected, however, and her aim had been near perfect on the first shot. Not bad after a long layoff.

She fired six more rounds quickly and succinctly.

She brought the target forward.

Wow! She was pleased. Pretty good for a chick who hadn’t fired a shot in many weeks. Three hits right in the center. The others were off by less than an inch. She should do this for a living.

She sent the target back and reloaded, firing another seven rounds. Even better. One shot on the perimeter of the smallest circle, the others within it.

A real life shootout didn’t usually allow the luxury of a studied methodical aim, so she quickly graduated to a more challenging shooting pattern. She would raise the weapon quickly, no time to aim, and try to hit the center of the target.

This she did with great skill as well.

She had, in fact, forgotten how good she was at this. She continued on the range for another twenty minutes. Her skills were in excellent shape, she decided. She was more than pleased.

She went through two boxes of ammunition. Seventy-two shots, then stopped. She didn’t want her wrist to be sore the next day. She had done enough. She turned.

An even larger group of guys was watching her, their jaws open in admiration. Must have been a dozen of them. When she caught them looking, she was at first slightly resentful, then almost embarrassed.

Then they gave her an impromptu round of applause and a couple of “good ol’ boy” whoops of approval. She was their type of female, at least for the moment. She shook her head, laughed, and accepted the compliments.

“Beginner’s luck,” she said, carefully locking her weapon in its case.

“Yeah. Some beginner,” one of the younger guys said knowingly.

“Do they all shoot like that at UCLA?” another one asked.

“Only on the basketball court. Have a good evening, boys,” she said.

And she disappeared.

She phoned Robert from her car. He was home, following a difficult shift at the White House. Some wacko had breached the security at one of the side fences by climbing over and making a run for the Rose Garden.

The nut case hadn’t gotten more than twenty feet when he was tackled. But such occurrences always ramped up the anxiety level of the entire Presidential Protection Detail. And of course, investigations had to follow and the breach needed to be studied. One never knew whether one small incident was a prelude to something larger. In the post-9/11 world, acute paranoia was the new normal.

“So I’ll bring dinner over. How’s that?” she asked Robert. “We’ll have dinner; then I have to scoot. I have this Ukrainian stuff to study and a final FBI report to read.”

“Dinner would be great,” he said.

She picked up some Thai takeout for dinner after leaving Colosimo’s.

Robert lived at a big apartment complex on Dupont Circle, a building known as the Bang Bang Hotel because there were so many well-armed government security people living there and so many single women. It was two blocks away from the Iraqi consulate.

They split dinner. They lingered together for a while afterward, but Alex was back at her place by midnight.

She showered and spent half an hour looking at her Ukrainian books and working with one of Olga’s CDs. What an unforgiving language. Not like French with its charm, English with its complexities, Italian with its musicality, or Spanish with its history. But the tough parts-the existence of “perfective” and “imperfective” and the whole tangle relating to verbs of motion-were the same as in Russian, so at least Alex wasn’t starting cold.

To ingratiate herself with her teacher, she made a point of memorizing several phrases in the fifth chapter. She found that she could concoct a primitive conversation with reasonable ease.

Ja vpershe u vashij krajini. I’m in your country for the first time.

Ne serdytesja na mene. Please, don’t be angry with me.

Toward 1:00 a.m., she thought she heard a sound at her front door, almost like someone trying the knob. Cautiously, she went to the door and looked through the peephole. She relaxed. It was her neighbor, Don Tomás, the retired diplomat, wandering in, a little tipsy, humming a Lucero tune, his keys clicking against his own door.

She rechecked her own locks. She brewed a decaf cup of tea. She settled down at her kitchen table, positioning herself where she could see the door.

There was one final task at hand for the evening. She needed to read the final file she had been given, the FBI dossier on The Caspian Group.

She settled in and took the first step toward knowing Yuri Federov too well.

FBI Document UK-2008-5AR-2a

Subject: Ukraine› Organized Crime› Overview›

Caspian Group› Federov, Yuri

Initial report date: June 19, 2005

Amended: (7 times, most recently:) March 12, 2008

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington DC

Status: Highly Classified; AA-2

Author: S.A. Diane Liu, FBI, New York, Southern District

The Caspian Group (TCG) is a Ukrainian energy conglomerate doing business with Western Europe and the United States and presumably Asia. The latter market will warrant careful scrutiny in the future.

The unofficial head of operations of TCG is a Ukrainian of Russian extraction named Yuri Federov. Almost uniquely, TCG functions without actual incorporation within Ukraine.

Their assets exceed one billion dollars {See Chart 56-2008a-1}. They invest in all financial sectors common to entities that do business with governments and the military. Additionally, they have positions in all criminal enterprises in Ukraine, including heroin and trafficking in women.

TCG’s young enforcers were trained by veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. They are infamous for their extreme brutality. Their victims are usually business people who have balked at extortion demands. Victims have been known to have been repeatedly stabbed and tortured, then mutilated before they are butchered. Others have been fitted with concrete cinderblocks and thrown live into the Desna River. The wave of terror has been so hideous that it has scared many of the competing crime groups away from doing business in Ukraine…

Since the collapse of Communism,, “ukrainka mafia,” the Ukrainian Mafia, has become bigger, more brutal, and better armed. It is now as wealthy as any Russian crime cartel. It wields the same worldwide influence as its major counterparts in Colombia. The Ukrainian Mafia traffics narcotics, currency, human sex slaves, handguns, carbines, submachine guns, antiaircraft missiles, helicopters, plutonium, and enriched uranium.