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today?”
    “Yes I am.”
    “You want to come with us? With Sean and me? We can go to Pompeii together and see the dead people,” he said. He suddenly realized he hadn’t even asked Woods. “If that’s okay with you?” he said to Sean. “We’ll all go together.”
    Woods stared at him, amazed.
    She studied Vialli carefully. “I don’t really know you.” She leaned back against the seat as the train rounded a curve. She considered. “Why not.”
     
3
     
    “As of right now each of you is a member of a special task force to track the attack on the Gaza border, and identify the group responsible. This one has the Director’s attention.” Joe Kinkaid, Director of Counter-Terrorism at the CIA, had them hanging on every word. This was the kind of assignment they all longed for. It could launch a career. Kinkaid’s unit had two hundred members. It was their job to identify and track all terrorist threats worldwide that might threaten American interests. He was overworked but he loved his job. He was one of the few people in Greater Washington who went home every night knowing he was making the world better for his children. In his mid-fifties, he was out of shape and didn’t care. What he cared about was that his mind was working at full speed, which it always was.
    Kinkaid pressed the space bar on the laptop computer sitting on the lectern and the screen in the front of the room lit up with the first slide of his presentation. The screen was blue with decorative red in the lower-right corner. In large white letters the slide said: gaza task force.
    “This task force is classified Top Secret. I expect it will go code word in the not too distant future. No one outside this room has a need to know about us or what we’re doing unless I say so. You know the drill.” He touched the space bar again, and the next slide came up. It was in outline form and provided him with the bullet points he wanted to be sure to make. “The Gaza attack occurred after dawn, about eight in the morning, local time. Stranded truck, turned around, doors burst open. Big firefight.”
    The next slide showed a photograph of the checkpoint. There were several bodies on the road near one side, and a burning APC across the fence on the Israeli side. The high-quality color photo had words on the bottom: secret, noforn, wnintel. Classified secret, not to be released to foreign intelligence or military, and a warning notice, that intelligence sources or methods were involved in the acquisition of the photo that made it more sensitive than the usual secret photo.
    “Note what we all know, and what we’ve all heard on CNN, that both Palestinian guards and Israeli guards were killed. This is different. I can’t think of any time someone has taken on the Israelis
and
the Palestinians at the same time.”
    He touched his space bar. Another photo came up with the same inscription on the bottom. “Here is the van, and the weapons that were captured.” The photo was a close-up of the van as it sat in the alley. It was dark, but the weapons could be seen.
    A dark man in the back that Sami had never seen spoke. “They wanted them to be found.”
    Kinkaid looked at him quickly, agreeing. “That’s how I see it. These weapons are all lined up. Like they’re on display at a gun show.” He went to the next slide, which was a well-lit close-up of one of the weapons. “Here, you can even see the serial number on the M-60.” The members of the task force studied the photo. Kinkaid went on. “Not only are the guns neatly arranged, they were left in order — by serial number, lowest to highest.”
    The task force members were puzzled.
    The dark man spoke again. “They’re showing their escape went as planned. No hurry at all.”
    “What’s the point of that?” Sami asked, unable to remain quiet.
    “What indeed,” Kinkaid asked. “Any ideas?”
    “It’s a message,” the dark man said.
    Kinkaid replied, “Clearly.” Then to the others.