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of an unfinished meal of pungent lamb and rice. With a sudden wrist snap, he hurled the dripping plate hard against the kitchen door.
    At the same time he shifted upright into a professional shooting crouch—a two-handed pistol grip with both arms rigid.
    Moussa came up again, shooting. The Butcher fired twice at the slapping noise against the kitchen door.
Moussa had a grenade in his left hand! Son of a bitch!
    Arch Carroll squeezed the trigger.
    Moussa looked incredibly surprised.
    The far right of Hussein Moussa’s forehead gushed blood. He slid down against a table still covered with mounds of food and tableware. His back dragged the cloth, plates, wine and water glasses. He spit out a throaty curse across the room.
    Then the terrorist’s gun rose again.
    Carroll shot Hussein Moussa a second time, the bullet exploding his right cheek. The Lebanese Butcher fell heavily forward onto the back of a fat diner lying on the floor.
    Carroll shot Moussa again, as the man trapped underneath wriggled like a beached fish and screamed.
    There was an eerie, terrible silence inside the Sinbad Star. A second or two passed like that. Then loud crying started. There were angry shouts and relieved hugging all over the restaurant.
    His gun thrust stiffly forward, Arch Carroll moved awkwardly across the chaotic room. He was still in a police school crouch. It was as if he were locked into that position.
    He carefully examined the Rashid brothers. Wadih and Anton were still alive. He looked at Moussa. The Butcher was dead, and the world was instantly a better place in which to live.
    “Please call me an ambulance,” Carroll spoke softly to the astonished restaurant owner. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry this had to happen in your establishment. These men are terrorists. Professional killers.”
    The Sinbad Star restaurant owner continued to stare with disbelief at Carroll. His black eyes were small, shiny beads stuck in his broad forehead and they pierced to the rear of Arch Carroll’s skull.
    “And what are you? What are
you,
please tell me, mister?”

Chapter 9
    GREEN BAND HAD struck like an invisible army.
    Two nervous New York City TAC patrolmen, Airy Simmons and Robert Havens, were carefully threading a path through the smoldering ruins of the Federal Reserve Bank located on Maiden Lane. The two men were attached at their belts to five-hundred-yard-long safety lines snaking back toward the street.
    The patrolmen were deep inside what had once been the Fed’s massive and richly ornamented public lobby. Indeed, the gray and blue limestone, the sandstone bricks of the Federal Reserve had always impressed visitors with a sense of their durability and authority. The fortlike appearance, the stout iron bars on every window, had reinforced the image of self-importance and impregnability. The image had obviously been a sham.
    The destruction which officers Simmons and Havens found downstairs in the Coin Section was difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to assess.
    Mountainous coin-weighing machines had been blown apart like a child’s toys. Fifty-pound coin bags were strewn open every where.
    The marble floor was easily three feet deep in quarters, dimes, nickels. Building support columns had been knocked down everywhere on the basement floor. The entire structure seemed to be trembling.
    In the deepest basement of the Federal Reserve Bank was the largest single accumulation of gold stored anywhere in the world. It all belonged to foreign governments. The Fed both guarded the gold and kept track of who owned what. In an ordinary change of ownership, the Fed merely moved gold from one country’s bin into another’s. The gold was transported on ordinary metal carts, like books in a library. The security system in the deep basement was so highly elaborate that even the Reserve Bank’s president had to be accompanied when he ventured into the gold storage area.
    Now patrolmen Havens and Simmons were alone in the cavernous