Robert Liparulo

In the first draft of Robert Liparulo's thriller Comes a Horseman, the coprotagonists-FBI agents Brady Moore and Alicia Wagner-were helped out of a particularly hairy situation by police sniper Byron Stone. Byron was a moody fellow, renowned as much for his reticence as for his skill with a rifle. Ultimately, pacing considerations trumped Liparulo's (and early readers') affection for Byron, and his scenes wound up being edited out.

Byron, of course, wasn't happy. He nagged at the edges of Liparulo's mind, always asking the same questions: What makes me so gloomy? How did I become so proficient with a gun? What's my story? After a while, Liparulo started jotting down answers, eventually explaining Byron's life in the notes, outlines and fragments of three yet-unwritten thrillers- Recoil, Recon and Return.

While Byron Stone draws blood from Liparulo's own heart, he's also a compilation of Liparulo's acquaintances, including a SWAT sniper and an FBI sniper (imagine their disagreements). These two shared the qualities of quiet, nearly impenetrable machismo and subtly troubled spirits. The taking of lives made them each respect life that much more.

They would kill only when it would save more lives, or a more innocent life. But this creed allowed them only to pull the trigger. Bad guy or not, a life is a life, and to hell with how tough snipers act, their souls ache for each of the ones they ended.

A sniper's knowledge that his job is necessary, crashing headlong into his humanity-this was the conflict Liparulo wanted to explore with Byron. Kill Zone does not answer all of Byron's questions, but it opens a window on the police sniper's moral struggle.

KILL ZONE

The sweaty, beard-stubbled face wavered behind the sniper's crosshairs. The suspect's eyes flicked around-to the kids, weeping in a corner; to the apartment door, propped closed with a chair because he had broken the latch when he kicked it in; to the window, where he seemed to expect the peering faces of would-be rescuers. Forget that it was five stories up, with no fire escape.

Keep looking, buddy, the sniper thought. All the better to keep you in my sights.

It was bad enough that the gun-brandishing creep had provoked the wrath of the city's SWAT team; now he had Byron Stone's rifle pointed at him. Most folks would have told the offender to jump out the window and get done with it.

Byron was as comfortable with a rifle as an accountant is with a mechanical pencil. From his eighth birthday, when he was bequeathed his granddaddy's.22 for plunking at cans and groundhogs (and stray cats when no one was looking), through boot camp, Ranger training, sniper school and the police academy, he figured he hadn't gone longer than a week without shooting a gun. Breathing required more thought.

Now he was poised across the street and a floor up from the commandeered apartment. He could see the perp, scruffy and likely drunk, holding a woman in front of him with a thick arm around her neck. In his other hand was a pistol, which he alternately held to the woman's temple and pointed at the kids. The sniper panned to the next window. The children were still there. The boy was little, no older than three. The girl was about eleven, his own son's age. They were terrified.

He panned back to the man who was threatening them. He tensed. The woman was no longer struggling. She was hanging like a doll in the man's grip. There was no blood and he'd heard no shot. Could he have strangled her? Broken her neck? She lifted her hand to touch her captor's arm, and Byron relaxed slightly. She had simply realized the futility of fighting, or was too exhausted to continue. Now she was only partially blocking the man's face from Byron's view, instead of randomly flailing her head around, which wasn't the brightest idea in situations involving snipers.

He watched the perp jerk her this way, then that, waving the gun like a conductor's baton. It appeared to be a.38 snub-nose revolver, what they used to call a Saturday night special-cheap, but lethal.

Eyeing the scene through the scope's optics was like watching a television program with the volume turned off. The networks would have dropped this show a long time ago. The acting was melodramatic, the plot was nonexistent. In fact, Byron did not know the story at all. Was this a lovers' spat gone off the deep end? A fouled drug deal? Maybe the guy had chosen a door at random: some people meet their soul mates in chance encounters; the woman and her children had met the devil. Whatever ill wind blew the man to that apartment also stirred people like Byron, people who made it their life's work to stop bad guys from preying on innocence.

Byron noticed the woman was wearing a waitress's uniform, light blue with white trim. A name tag clung to her left breast, but her constant flailing prevented him from reading its inscription. He felt a pang of sympathy for her. Two kids. A deadend job. Living in a one-room dive, in which the "kitchen" amounted to a few appliances and a countertop running along one wall of the living room; he could see its pink tiles, a plastic grocery bag of something lying like a disemboweled stomach on the counter, an open bag of bread. And now this.

He drew a bead on the man's head. He was going for a clean kill, one that would short-circuit even the death spasm that could cause the hostage-taker's finger to twitch on the trigger and grant him one last victim. That meant severing the nervous system pathway, an inch wide, at the back of the skull-on a wildly moving target. Between the rifle's muzzle and the target were a hundred and twenty yards of gusty winds and a pane of glass. If the bullet managed to zing past the hostage's head to find its mark, a final barricade of tooth and bone would try to deflect it away from the brain stem, so crucial to the hostages' safety.

"Piece of cake," Byron whispered as he aligned the crosshairs on the man's philtrum, the dimple between nose and upper lip.

His heart seemed to thump especially hard, causing Byron's aim to jerk away from the man's head. He knew the spasm, imperceptible to anyone but him, was no involuntary physical tic- the kind that ended the careers of surgeons and snipers. This one came from deep within, from a bit of conscience that told him the object in his sights was flesh and bone.

Perspiration tickled his scalp. The sweatband along the inside edge of his cap would keep it from blinding him. He allowed his eyes to close. For only a second, then two. Vision, again…and the man's head in the scope. Byron's stomach cramped.

A creak of wood reminded him he was not alone. His spot-ter-the second half of every police sniper team-stood on a chair behind him, watching the scene through powerful binoculars. Usually, the spotter gave periodic updates on wind velocity and direction, SWAT team movements, the position of hostages. In this case, he would have confirmed the children's whereabouts so the sniper's attention could have stayed on the target. But this spotter was different. He had been silent for the nearly three hours the two had been in position.

Three hours. Sometimes an operation lasted only minutes.

More often, it was a waiting game.

Upon receiving a brief sketch of the situation, Byron had selected this building, and after rejecting three other locations, settled on this abandoned room. The fading ghost of something rotting lingered in the air, but his nose had acclimated to it. Carefully, he had cut the pane from the window, because raised windows tended to draw suspicion, and shooting through glass decreased accuracy. He'd hung cheesecloth over it like sheer curtains to hide behind, without affecting his tightly focused view through the sniper-scope.