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of Investigation. We’d all found swivel chairs from unoccupied desks, and everyone had a ceramic coffee mug in his or her hand. I really wanted a donut—a sugar donut—but there’s this thing with cops and donuts that people find funny for some reason, and I wasn’t going to have a donut.
    We all had our jackets off, so we could see one another’s holsters. Even after twenty years in law enforcement, I find that this makes everyone’s voice a couple of octaves lower, even the women.
    Anyway, we were all leafing through our folders on this alleged defector, whose name was Asad Khalil. What cops call the folder, by the way, my new friends call the dossier. Cops sit on their asses and flip through their folders. Feds sit on their derrières and peruse their dossiers.
    The information in the folder is called the book on the guy, the information in the dossier is called, I think, the information. Same thing, but I have to learn the language.
    Anyway, there wasn’t much in my folder, or their dossier, except a color photo transmitted by the Paris Embassy, plus a real short bio, and a brief sort of This-is-what-we-think-the-prick-is-up-to kind of report compiled by the CIA, Interpol, British MI-6, the French Sûreté and a bunch of other cop and spook outfits around Europe. The bio said that the alleged defector was a Libyan, age about thirty, no known family, no other vitals, except that he spoke English, French, a little Italian, less German, and, of course, Arabic.
    I glanced at my watch, stretched, yawned, and looked around. The Conquistador Club, in addition to being an ATTF facility, doubled as an FBI field office and CIA hangout and who knew what else, but on this Saturday afternoon, the only people there were us five of the ATTF team, the duty officer whose name was Meg, and Nancy Tate out front. The walls, incidentally, are lead-lined so that nobody outside can eavesdrop with microwaves, and even Superman can’t see us.
    Ted Nash said to me, “I understand you might be leaving us.”
    I didn’t reply, but I looked at Nash. He was a sharp dresser, and you knew that everything was custom-made, including his shoes and holster. He wasn’t bad-looking, nice tan, salt-and-pepper hair, and I recalled quite distinctly that Beth Penrose got a little sweaty over him. I had convinced myself that this was not why I didn’t like him, of course, but it certainly added fat to the fires of my smoldering resentment, or something like that.
    George Foster said to me, “If you give this assignment ninety days, then whatever decision you make will be given serious consideration.”
    “Really?”
    Foster, as the senior FBI guy, was sort of like the team leader, which was okay with Nash, who was not actually
on
the team, but drifted in and out if the situation called for CIA, like it did today.
    Foster, dressed in his awful blue-serge-I’m-a-Fed suit, added, rather bluntly, “Ted’s leaving on overseas assignment in a few weeks, then it will only be us four.”
    “Why can’t he leave
now?”
I suggested subtly.
    Nash laughed.
    By the way, Mr. Ted Nash, aside from hitting on Beth Penrose, had actually added to his list of sins by threatening me during the Plum Island thing—and I’m not the forgiving type.
    George Foster said to me, “We have an interesting and important case that we’re working on that involves the murder of a moderate Palestinian by an extremist group here in New York. We need you for that.”
    “Really?” My street instincts were telling me that I was getting smoke blown up my ass. Ergo, Foster and Nash needed a guy to take the fall for something, and whatever it was, I was getting set up to go down. I felt like hanging around just to see what they were up to, but to be honest, I was out of my element here, and even bozos could bring you down if you weren’t careful.
    I mean, what a coincidence that I wound up on this team. The ATTF is not huge, but it’s big enough so that this arrangement looked