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of pain in his eyes it took her breath away. "But I will," she told him.
    EnRoute to Langley
    He climbed in the back seat of the Cadillac limousine, and his driver, Dick Yemm, immediately pulled out and headed off at a high speed. "Sorry to bust in on you like this, boss. Mr. Adkins held down the fort for as long as he could until we could get a better handle on the situation."
    "Okay, Dick what's the story?"
    "Alien Trumble was shot to death about six hours ago down in Orlando." Yemm was a very small, compact man, as rigid and as tough as bar steel, but he was shaking.
    It was like a ton of bricks had fallen on McGarvey's head, but he held himself in check. "Do we have somebody with Gloria and the kids?"
    "They got them too, along with a couple of innocent bystanders." Yemm viciously cut a driver off and ran a stop sign. "Sonofabitch, boss. Sonofabitch."
    The news was simply unbelievable, impossible to digest; it was a random act of violence, like a lightning bolt. Except he knew that it hadn't been random. "What took us so long?" he demanded.
    "The Bureau didn't find out that Alien worked for us until after eight, and by the time the duty office made contact with Mr. Adkins it was late. Nobody could believe it. We thought it was some stupid mistake."
    Already they were out of Chevy Chase on Western Avenue, their speed topping one hundred miles per hour. Luckily traffic was light. Yemm radioed his position to the duty dispatcher. "Hammerhead is enroute. ETA about twenty."
    Although Yemm was only a driver bodyguard he was the DDO's bodyguard and he kept his ears open. It didn't hurt that he was smart in addition to being tough. He was an ex-SEAL, and he and McGarvey had a lot of history together. For all practical purposes his need to know cut across almost the entire DO. Like McGarvey he was a man who hated bullshit and bureaucracy. He told it like it was. In addition he had given Trumble shooting lessons for re qualification last winter, so he had a personal stake.
    "What do we know so far?" McGarvey asked, trying to keep his thoughts in order. He had been yanked from Katy's arms back into the real world, and her feel and scent had already faded into that other place in his head.
    "Looks like bin Ladden ordered it." Yemm's jaw visibly tightened in the rearview mirror. When he was mad he ground his teeth. "There were four of them, AK-47s. Alien wasn't carrying, but he managed to bag one of the bad guys anyway. Hit him in the head with something. The Bureau's Orlando SAC talked to the bastard in the ambulance before he died."
    "Do we have a solid ID on him?" McGarvey wasn't going to telephone Adkins because his ADDO had his hands full now, but he needed more information.
    "Bari Yousef. Twenty-nine, born in Cairo, came over here in 'ninety-eight. Until two weeks ago he worked as a truck driver for Jersey City Transport, then he disappeared."
    The trucking company was under investigation. It was
    believed that it was one of a number of possible fronts for bin Ladden's operations here in the States. The Bureau's antiterrorist division had been warning for years that bin Laden was going to extend his terrorist attacks to the States. The trucking company and some other enterprises, among them a couple of banks in New Jersey, were thought to be the precursors to something big that was coming. Something that would make Oklahoma City look small. Yemm must have been within earshot in the Ops Center when the connection had been made.
    The problem with being DDO was that he got to hear everything, not just the bits and pieces like Yemm. Where Dick was mad, McGarvey was frightened. If the consensus on bin Laden was correct they were going to have the biggest fight of their lives on their hands. This time they were playing with fire. Very serious fire. And a lot of people would get hurt unless the U.S. was very careful in how it responded..
    "They were on vacation, boss," Yemm said, angry and frustrated. "Minding their own business. Not