Chapter 4
The men shifted. One whispered to another. Mercer leaned closer. "I asked you a question."
I looked at the American flag near the far wall. Then I looked back at him. "I know."
The room absorbed that. Something in the atmosphere changed when a person declines to answer a direct question from a superior-ranked officer and does it without hostility, without apology, without the nervous energy that would have made it a provocation. The absence of nervousness was the thing nobody had calibrated for.
"You here to observe?" Mercer asked.
"I'm here to work."
He gestured at the equipment around us. "This work? This isn't a hotel gym."
I looked at the sled at the far end of the floor. It was loaded for a team session, three hundred and twenty pounds on a rail plate drag setup, the kind of configuration used for conditioning work when the gym was occupied by people who did this for a living. A training handle extended from the front of the sled on a two-meter chain.
"Then act like one," I said.
I walked past him.
He let me pass, which surprised him as much as it surprised anyone watching, because he had not decided to step aside so much as his feet had failed to produce the block they were supposed to produce. The moment was fast enough that it could be explained away, but everyone in the room had registered it.
I reached the sled.
May you like
I looked at the loaded plates. I looked at the floor ahead of it, forty meters of rubber to the far wall. I picked up the training handle with my right hand, settled my weight into my hips, and I drove.
The sled moved.
