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sometimes wondered why it was that a reasonably intelligent thirty-five-year-old man, someone with decent enough prospects, someone with a law degree, could regularly be working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, invariably eating stone-cold pizza and Pepsi-Cola for dinner, was sitting outside a Middle Eastern restaurant on a Friday night stakeout?
    Why was that?
    Was it perhaps because his father and two uncles had been pavement-pounding city cops?
    Was it because his grandfather had been a rough and tumble example of New York’s finest?
    Or did it have to do with things he’d seen a decade and a half ago in Viet Nam?
    Maybe he just wasn’t a reasonable, intelligent man, as he’d somehow always presumed? Maybe, if you got right down to it, there was some kind of obvious short-circuit in the wires of the old brain, some form of synaptic fuck-up.
    As Arch Carroll pondered the tangible mistakes of his life, he noticed that his attention had begun to wander.
    For several minutes at a clip, he’d stare at his sadly wiggling toes, at the equally fascinating burning ember of his cigarette, at almost anything mildly distracting.
    Five-week-long stakeouts weren’t exactly recommended for their entertainment value. That was exactly how long he’d been watching Anton and Wadih Rashid.
    Now Carroll’s attention had suddenly snapped back …
    “What the …” he mumbled out loud as he stared down the congested street.
Is that who it looks like? … Can’t be … I think it is … but it can’t be.
    Carroll had suddenly noticed a skinny, frazzle-haired man coming directly his way from the Frente Unido Bar and Data Indonesia. The man was scurrying up Atlantic Avenue, periodically looking back over his right shoulder.
    At a distance, he looked like a baggy coat walking on a stick.
    Carroll slowly pushed himself up out of his half-frozen lounging position against the restaurant wall.
    He squinted his eyes tight for a better look at the figure approaching from down the street.
    He couldn’t believe it!
    He
stared
down the street, his eyes smarting from the’ bite of the wind. He had to make sure.
    Jesus.
He was sure.
    The fast-walking man had a huge puffy burr of bushy, very wiry black hair. The greasy hair was combed straight back; it hung like a limp sack over the collar of his black cloth jacket.
    Carroll knew the man by two names: one was Hussein, Moussa; the other was the
Lebanese Butcher.
A decade before, Moussa had been recruited by the Russians; he’d been trained at their famed Third World school in Tripoli.
    Since then Moussa had been busily free-lancing terror and sophisticated murder techniques all over the world: in Paris, Rome, Zaire, New York, in Lebanon for Colonel Qadaffi. Recently, he’d worked for Francois Monserrat, who had taken over not only Juan Carlos’s European terrorist cell, but South America, and now the United States as well.
    Hussein Moussa halted in front of the Sinbad Star restaurant. Like a very careful driver at a tricky intersection, he looked both ways.
    Twice more he looked up and down Atlantic Avenue. He even noticed the bag man camped out across the traffic-busy street.
    He finally disappeared behind the gaudy red door of the Sinbad Star.
    Arch Carroll sat up rigidly straight against the crumbling brick wall of the Syrian restaurant.
    He groped inside his jacket and produced a stubby third of a Camel cigarette. He lit up and inhaled the gruff, North Carolina dirt farm tobacco.
    What an unexpected little Christmas present. What a just reward for endless winter nights trailing the Rashids.
The Lebanese Butcher on a silver platter.
    His bosses in State had said not to touch the Rashids without extremely strong physical evidence. But they’d issued no such orders for the Lebanese Butcher.
    What was Hussein Moussa doing in New York, anyway? Carroll’s mind was reeling. Why was Moussa here with the Rashids?
    The firebombing of Pier 33–34 went through his mind quickly. He had picked up strands