CHAPTER TWO
Paige King barely ducked out of the way of a blow aimed at her head, feeling it pass by just an inch, the whisper of air as it passed scraping across her skin. Another strike came at her, and she lifted her hands to block instinctively, only to find the weight of her attacker barreling into her.
The difference in size was massive, and decisive, impossible to hold back. It meant that she found herself tumbling to the floor, with the bulk of her opponent on top of her. She tried to struggle out from underneath him, the way she’d been shown, but his weight meant that there was no room to execute a simple standup, and her attempts to flip him over to create some room achieved nothing.
Paige saw the moment when her attacker reached back behind him, and she knew without being told what that meant. She’d trained for this.
“Knife!” she called out, reaching to try to control the weapon arm.
Paige wasn’t quite quick enough, and she had a moment of absolute terror as the arm came around, the blade a blur as it struck her again and again. Paige felt herself starting to go limp in response to the blows.
“Don’t stop!” her instructor yelled from somewhere above her. “Keep fighting!”
Paige did her best, kicking away at her opponent, creating space, but then he was back on top of her, still stabbing.
“Ok, break!”
Paige had rarely been as grateful for anything as she was for those two words. It meant that the large, heavily padded figure of her simulated attacker got off her, while she got to haul herself up off the mats at the FBI academy’s training facility.
Around her, other FBI trainees stood waiting for their turn at the side of the mats or working with padded opponents of their own, fighting hard as they tried to keep them at bay. It struck Paige as deeply unfair somehow that all the attackers got to wear massive amounts of padding, while she got none; but she suspected that the unfairness was a deliberate part of the drill. She would have bruises on her ribs from the rubber knife in the morning.
“You have to be more aggressive, King,” the instructor said. “You have to take down the suspect, not just wait for him to kill you.”
“Yes, sir,” Paige said, but honestly, she felt as though that kind of aggression was the one part of this that didn’t come easily to her. It was a part of herself she always flinched away from. In the background, she could see other students elbowing and punching, lashing out with everything they had. She wasn’t sure if she really had that in her.
“Ok, back to the line. And when it’s your turn again, I want to see you be more proactive about all this.”
Paige went back to the side, standing among all the other FBI trainees in their sweatpants and FBI t-shirts. Paige had never worn a uniform before, had never even been in the Girl Scouts, and it felt strange to be just one more almost identical part of a big machine.
She wondered what anyone from college would think if they could see her now, red hair slick with sweat, youthful features flushed with the effort of training so hard. Probably, they would ask her exactly why she’d completed her PhD in criminal psychology, looking at one of the nation’s worst serial killers, only to jump straight into training to be an FBI agent after helping to recapture him when he escaped, rather than going into the more sedate world of academia as she’d been preparing to do.
Paige might not have been able to give a coherent answer to that just a few months ago when she’d signed up for the FBI academy in the wake of helping to catch escaped serial killer Adam Riker. She may have said something general about how it would let her put the things she’d learned to practical use, rather than being sat in an academic office, reading dusty books. Slowly, that had crystalized into the feeling that this was where Paige was meant to be, what she was meant to be doing.
Although it was kind of hard to maintain that feeling when she’d just been stabbed repeatedly with a rubber knife, hard enough to leave bruises.
“Higgs is a hard-ass,” another of the trainees there, a young Hispanic woman named Rosa, said. She was taller than Paige, and obviously in shape. She excelled in the physical aspects of the training in a way that Paige simply didn’t. “Hang in there. You’ll be fine.”
It was her turn next, and Rosa went out hard, slamming into the opponent in the padded suit, giving him no time to get to the knife before she had him pinned to the floor, wrenching him over onto his stomach into an arrest position and controlling him there until the instructor called a halt.
Paige wished that she could do that kind of thing so easily. So far in the training, all the didactic aspects had been fine for her, memorizing the law and procedures she needed to know, how to maintain the chain of evidence, how to go about reading a crime scene. Paige had been a natural when it came to interrogation technique, and when they’d gone through classic cases in their sessions to understand how the FBI had gone about solving them, Paige had already known most of them. She was good at that kind of thing.
The physical aspects were harder, though. Paige was just about keeping up when it came to the running and the physical fitness, but she barely made it around the obstacle courses, and hand to hand combat like this was harder still. She could hit the target with a pistol, but that got a lot harder when they did drills designed to simulate an actual situation. Paige found herself, every time, thinking back to the moment when she’d shot Adam Riker in order to try to save her mother. The result was a lack of aggression that meant failing, over and over.
Paige hoped that she was getting better, slowly learning what she would need to be an agent, and then how to apply it as a profiler once she made it into the FBI. In spite of the difficulty of the physical aspects of the course, she was determined to keep going, whatever it took.
“King, you’re up again!” Higgs called out.
Paige steeled herself, going forward, squaring up to her heavily padded foe. Whatever it took, she reminded herself, as that foe surged forward.
*
Paige groaned and iced the worst of her bruises in her room at the training facility. That last session had hurt, but there was no slacking off from the next training session. That would just be an admission that she wasn’t up to the demands of being an agent, of going out into the world and catching bad guys. She had to grit her teeth and keep going.
She sat there, reading through another book on investigative technique while she waited for the pain in her ribs to subside. Paige couldn’t concentrate, though, and in any case, she’d already made notes on this chapter once. Throughout the training, Paige had always applied all the techniques she’d used in her research to the process of learning, forcing the information into her head so that it would be there again whenever she needed it in the future.
Honestly, compared to the process of trying to write a PhD, the intellectual part of this was easy. Most things were, it turned out. It had been easy for Paige to forget when she’d been doing her PhD that she was actually good at this kind of thing. A PhD was designed to challenge people who were already pretty much at the top of their class, and while she’d been doing hers, the only other students Paige had spent much time around had also been grad students. Researching at a high level had just seemed… well, normal.
Paige was still working on the finer theoretical points of how the FBI went about tailing someone, using multiple teams handing over to one another, when her mother called. There had been times in the past when Paige might not have picked up immediately, worried about the way the conversation would go, when she would have had to build herself up to the prospect of talking to her mother.