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hurting anybody. Christ, you know Alien; the man would go out of his way to avoid stepping on a bug."
    "Take it easy, Dick. I know how you feel," McGarvey said. "What about the other three shooters?"
    "They were driving a Chevy van, stolen in Atlanta four days ago, on a Florida plate that the owner in Tampa didn't even know was stolen until the cops showed up at her door. Some guy and his wife saw what was going down and they called 911 on their cell phone. The van was abandoned about a half-mile from Interstate 4, and nobody else saw a thing."
    "How'd we ID Yousef?"
    "Prints off his gun. The Bureau ran them and came up with a red flag. The bastard was one of bin Laden's shooters, and he shouldn't have been able to clear customs in the first place. The passport people at Kennedy fucked up."
    It was a common occurrence, one of the downsides of a totally free country. As one senior Immigration and Naturalization official told McGarvey, trying to stop illegals coming ashore in leaky old boats was tough enough, but checking people flying in on supposedly legitimate passports was like trying to stop a flood with your finger in the dike.
    In the end it was up to the CIA's foreign stations to come up with lists of undesirables, and for the FBI's special units on espionage and counterterrorism to see that the bad guys who did manage to get here didn't do any harm. The CIA and the Bureau were doing a damned fine job, most of their successes never appearing in the media, but the problem was no less impossible than Immigration's.
    Now it was starting again, McGarvey thought morosely. In the never-ending battle you won a few, but you lost some too. The Khobar Barracks, the New York Trade Towers, Oklahoma City, the Nairobi embassy, and a host of others to which Orlando would be added.
    But this was just the opening move. To what, he wondered. How far would it go this time? He had a very bad feeling that they were going to find out a lot sooner than they wanted to, and once again he was going to be right in the middle of it. Coming to work for the CIA right out of college and Air Force had been just a job, like a military career. Something you did. His parents had worked for the government at Los Alamos and it had been his turn. But after his parents had been killed in the car crash he had been locked into the Company by shackles whose links he had forged himself with his own conscience and sense of fair play. President Truman had a sign on his desk that read: the buck stops here. The sign or McGarvey's desk read:
    THE BULLSHIT STOPS HERE.
    CHAPTER FOUR
    CIA Headquarters
    It was 12:25 a.m. when McGarvey, still dressed in his tuxedo, his bow tie undone, reached his office. He'd talked to Trumble five days ago, sending his Riyadh COS and his family on a two-week vacation, and now they were dead. In that time the only thing they'd accomplished was to agree to wait until Alien got back to help with the ops planning for another meeting with bin Laden. Nobody had the least inkling that Trumble was in danger, but it was something that McGarvey knew he should have considered.
    But bin Laden didn't work that way; on such a small scale, in Trumble's words. Or at least he'd never worked that way before, and there was no logical reason for him to start now. If he'd wanted Trumble dead, he would have killed him in Khartoum, not waited until the man returned to the United States presumably to report on the meeting, and then taken the risk of killing him and his family in such a public place. Yet he had to keep reminding himself that logical reason might not apply to a man such as bin Laden. Maybe the bastard had finally gone around the bend, really gone nuts. That was a cheery thought.
    Dick Adkins walked in from his adjoining office, a stricken, angry expression on his face. McGarvey had seen that kind of look before.
    "It came out of left field, Mac."
    "Short of keeping them in a safe house, there's nothing we could have done," McGarvey said bitterly.