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Impossible.

  Army corpsmen were staring down.

  Ours.

  Our corpsmen!

  “Breathe deeply, Captain Hudson. Just breathe now. Just breathe. Breathe. There, that's good. That's very good… That's excellent, Captain Hudson.

  “It's pure oxygen, Captain. Oxygen! Breathe. Breathe. Breathe deeply.”

  White cloth straps were holding him tightly, painfully so. Blue and red plastic tubes ran in and out of his nose. More tubes were connected to his arms and legs. Colored wires and rubber plugs were attached to his chest and from there to an icy blue machine.

  “Captain Hudson. Captain Hudson, can you hear me? Can you understand me? You're in the Womack Hospital at Fort Bragg, Captain. You're going to be all right. Captain, can you understand me? You're in the Womack Hospital.”

  “Oh, please help me.”

  He was sobbing uncontrollably for the first time since he'd been a little boy. What was happening? Oh, please, what was this? What was real and what wasn't?

  “Captain, you're in the Fort Bragg Center. You're in the JFK Special Warfare Center… Captain Hudson?… Captain?… Just breathe the oxygen! Captain, that's an order Breathe in… breathe out… that's very good. Very, very good. That's excellent, Captain.”

  Lying on his back, staring silently up at vague forms and swimming shapes, David Hudson thought that maybe he knew this man.

  Familiar voice? Familiar drooping walrus mustache. Did he know him? Was the man actually there? Hudson reached out to touch, but the cloth straps restrained him.

  “Captain Hudson, you're in Fort Bragg. This was a stress and tolerance test. Do you remember now?

  “Captain Hudson, this has been a drug-induced test. You haven't left this hospital room. You were flashing back to Vietnam.”

  None of this happened?

  No-there had been a Vietcong prison camp! Hallucinations?

  There had been a Lizard Man!

  Oh, please, make this all stop now.

  “Captain Hudson, you revealed nothing about your mission. You passed your tolerance test. Flying colors, pal. You were really great. Congratulations.”

  Mission?

  Test?

  Sure thing. Just a little pop quiz. Okay.

  “You're beginning to understand illusion, Captain. You refused to be interrogated under drugs… You're learning to be illusion's master. You're learning the fine art of deception, Captain Hudson. The art of our deadliest enemies…”

  “Horse Latitudes” was playing somewhere in the hospital… in the Special Forces Center. Deception.

  “Breathe that good air, Captain Hudson. Just breathe in easily. Pure, pure oxygen. You passed, Captain. You're the best so far. You're the best we've tested.”

  Stress and tolerance tests.

  The Womack Hospital at Fort Bragg.

  Deception.

  He was learning to be illusion's master.

  Deception.

  You passed, Captain Hudson. Flying colors, pal.

  Of course-I'm the best you have!

  I've always been the best-at everything.

  That's why I'm here, isn't it?

  That's why I was chosen for this training.

  Hallucination.

  “Breathe that pure oxygen, Captain Hudson.”

  Deception.

  23

  Riverdale, New York City

  Arch Carroll was only barely awake, barely functioning. Familiar home surroundings coalesced:

  Books on the mantel-Carroll loved nonfiction and also mysteries: The Brethren, Fatal Vision, The Pope of Greenwich Village, The Fate of the Earth.

  An oil painting of his father, done by Mary Katherine, hung on one wall.

  And there were children. Lots and lots of small children.

  They were eyeing him suspiciously, waiting for him to speak his mind, to say something characteristically flip and amazing.

  Carroll slowly sipped fresh-brewed coffee from a cracked Return of the Jedi mug. “Sunrise Semester” flickered on the portable TV with the sound off. The horizontal line lazily flipped out of sync with the rest of the room.

  The Carroll clan was together for a rare family conference. The menu comprised coffee, cocoa, and Arch Carroll's world-famous pop-up toaster waffles. It wasn't quite 6:00 A.M. on the morning of December 14. Green Band felt dead and buried in his mind.

  “Mmff… mmff… Lizzie mmff… Lizzie was a son of a bitch, Dad. While you were gone away.”

  Mickey Kevin reported this important news as he chewed gooey, heavily syruped wads of waffle. His mouth flapped open in a rubbery, half-smiling circle.

  “I think I told you about that kind of gutter talk.”

  “Mmff, mmff. You use gutter talk.”

  “Yeah, maybe my dad didn't kick my rear end enough. I won't make that same mistake, okay?”

  “Besides, I wasn't a son of a bitch. He was.” Lizzie suddenly glared up from the soggy remains on her plate.

  “Lizard! You're not too big to get an Ivory soap sandwich, either. Big bar, right fresh out of the wrapper.”

  The most angelic smile lit up Lizzie's face. “An Ivory soap sandwich, Daddy?… Better than Eggo, still-a-little-frozen waffles!” She leveled her father with a deadpan, brutal evaluation of his not entirely home-cooked breakfast offerings.

  They all began to laugh, then. Clancy and Mary started to giggle, nearly falling off their chairs. Mickey Kevin did topple off, like a carnival Kewpie doll. Carroll finally gave up and broke into a sleepy smile. He winked over at Mary K., who was letting him run the familiar four-ring circus this morning.

  He had been trying to tell them about his almost tragic trip to Europe. He'd been trying to be a reasonably good dad for the four of them… He fuzzily remembered how his own father had done the same sort of thing; telling sanitized stories about the 91st Precinct, right in that very same breakfast nook on Sunday mornings.

  Finally, after putting it off at least thirty minutes, Arch Carroll came to the really difficult part of his story-the punch line, so to speak-the core of his tale of adventure and foreign intrigue in England and Ireland…

  He was going to try to make this all sound very casual now… No big deal, right? So begin.

  “Over in Europe, I was working with someone… They had these special teams of police and financial people. Our best people. We worked in London, then in Belfast, together. A lady was nearly killed there, in fact. Over in Ireland. Her name's Caitlin. Caitlin Dillon.”

  Silence. The big chill comes to the Carroll house.

  Keep going. Don't stop now.

  “Sometime I'd like you guys to meet her. She's originally, uh, she's from out in Ohio. She's pretty funny, actually. Very nice. For a girl. Ha ha.”

  Absolute, stone-cold silence…

  Finally, a very tiny muffled reply from Lizzie. “No, thank you.”

  Carroll's eyes slowly, ever so slowly, passed from face to small, stony face.

  Mickey, who looked all soft and vulnerable in his Yankee pin-striped pj's with slipper socks, was amazingly close to tears. Clancy, in an oversized robe that made him look like ET in the movie's beer-drinking scene, was silent and more stoic. His small body was rigid with control.

  They were angry and unbelievably hurt-all at the same time. They knew exactly what was happening here.

  “Hey, come on, lighten up, okay?” Carroll tried to make it seem a little funny. Bill Murray on “Saturday Night Live,' which he did pretty well, despite the lack of any facial resemblance.

  “I talked to a woman who I happen to work with. Just talked. Hello, blah, blah, blah, good-bye.”

  They wouldn't say a word to him. They stared at him as if he had just said he was going to leave them. They made him feel so horribly bad.

  Come on, it's been three goddamn years.

  I'm closing up inside. I'm actually dying.

  “Come on, kids.” Mary Katherine finally spoke up from her purposely low-key spot at the kitchen table. “Be a little fair, huh. Doesn't your father
get to have some friends, too?”

  Silence.

  No, he doesn't.

  Not women friends.

  Lizzie finally started to cry. She tried to muffle her sobs, choking back the breathless gasps with both little hands.

  Then they were all crying, except Mickey Kevin, who kept staring murderously at his father.

  It was Carroll's worst moment with them since the night Nora had died on some high-and-mighty, antiseptic white floor in New York Hospital. His chest was beginning to heave now, too; he felt as if he were being cruelly, brutally, ripped in half.

  They weren't ready for someone else-maybe he wasn't ready, either.

  For the next several minutes, nothing he could say could make it any better. Nothing could make any of the kids laugh. Nothing could make them loosen up at all.

  They all hated Caitlin. They weren't going to give her a chance. Period. End of nondiscussion.

  They were fiercely determined to hate anyone who tried to take the place of their dead mother.

  24

  Manhattan

  Two hours later, on duty, Carroll's head was throbbing with dull pain. He felt he needed a stiff shot of Murphy's Irish whiskey. He also felt like going back to the role of Crusader Rabbit, running away into the convenient, strangely comfortable fantasy of the bag man. For the first time, maybe, he thought he was beginning to understand the past three years of his life.

  Later, at around nine o'clock, he would vaguely remember weaving a mostly aimless path inside number 13 Wall Street. The fluorescent lights were too bright; the glaring overhead lamps were harsh, tearing at his eyes.

  It was all wrong, the place felt wrong. There was too much gloom and doom, palpable frustration evident everywhere. The police investigators and Wall Street researchers bent over mountainous documents or hunched in paralysis in front of computer screens were like people who had been trapped indoors too long, men and women who hadn't seen the light of day for weeks. Even his own people, the usually unflappable Caruso included, had the quirky, tense mannerisms of heavy smokers suddenly deprived.

  Around nine-thirty Arch Carroll set to work again inside his monastic office.

  The broken windowpane hadn't been replaced, and the sheet of brown paper he'd stuck in the space hung limply now, like a beat-up old blind in an abandoned tenement. He kept the ceiling lights purposely bright, glaringly unpleasant. The door was shut tight so the radiator heat would build up.

  An illusion of warmth, he thought.

  Carroll was dressed appropriately for the overheated room: a Boston Celtics T-shirt that had the look of something left over from a banquet of moths, Levi's jeans, Crusader Rabbit's very own work boots. He was going to be comfortable, at least.

  He also had a bottle of Murphy's Irish whiskey on the desk. What would Walter Trentkamp say? Oh, to hell with Walter and his imposing virtues, his old-world cop mores.

  For a few minutes, slowly sipping the Irish, Arch Carroll thought about his job, jobs in general, the overwhelming job of life.

  This particular job had been an important part of his life for almost nine years now. He hadn't exactly planned it like that, but life tended to go its own idiosyncratic way. After the army tour, Carroll had finished law at Michigan State. He'd also married Nora. Right about the same time, both his father and Walter Trentkamp had come along to convince him to do some legal work for the DIA. So Carroll had become an agent as the result of a combination of financial pressures, his long policeman heritage, and the coaxing of Trentkamp and his father.

  It was weird, completely unfathomable, the ways of life. Society chose to overplay Wall Street salesmen, various marketing experts, obfuscating corporation lawyers, investment bankers. At the same time, society grossly underpaid the teachers of its children, its police, even its political leaders. Some kind of crazy society.

  Well, they seriously underpaid him to work at protecting them from harm's way. But he was going to protect them, anyway-as well as he possibly could.

  The nagging question was whether his best was going to be good enough. He'd had six good men, plus himself, on the streets since the night of December 4. So far they'd come up with almost nothing. How the hell could that be possible?

  He wandered around the cramped room for a while, like a man without any particular sense of direction. Then he went to his desk and sat down, waiting for the day's first suspects to appear.

  Green Band-why did he have the feeling just then that there was something important at the top of his mind, an obvious insight that had evaded him until now? It was infuriating and elusive.

  Did it have something to do with Green Band's inside information? A spy at 13 Wall?

  From a transcript taken in room 312; number 13 Wall; Monday, December 14.

  Present: Arch Carroll; Anthony Ferrano; Michael Caruso.

  CARROLL: Hello, Mr. Ferrano, I'm Mr. Carroll, Antiterrorist Division, State Department. This is my associate, Mr. Caruso. Mr. Ferrano, to get right to the point, not to waste any of your time, or mine, I need some information…

  FERRANO: Figured that out already.

  CARROLL: Uh-huh. Well, I read your earlier transcript. I just read over the conversation you had with Sergeant Caruso. I'm a little surprised you haven't heard anything about the bombing on Wall Street.

  FERRANO: Why's that? Why should I have?

  CARROLL: Well, for one thing, you being a heavy gun and explosives dealer, Mr. Ferrano. Doesn't it strike you as odd, uh, peculiar, you wouldn't have heard something? There must be rumors floating around on the street. I'm sorry, would you like a sip of whiskey?

  FERRANO: I want whiskey, I got money in my pocket. Listen, I told you, I told somebody, him, I don't deal guns. I don't know what you're talking that shit for, I own Playland Arcade Games, Inc., on Tenth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. You got that straight now?

  CARROLL: Okay, that's bullshit. Who do you think you're talking to? Some punk off the street? Just some street punk here?

  FERRANO: Hey, all right, fuck you. I want my lawyer in here now!… Hey, you understand English, pal? Lawyer! Now!… Hey! Hey!… Ohhh… oh, shit!

  (Loud scuffling, fighting sounds. Furniture crashing; man groaning.)

  CARROLL (breathing heavily): Mr. Ferrano, I think… feel it's important you understand something. Listen carefully to what I'm saying. Watch my lips… Ferrano, you've just entered the Twilight Zone. You don't have the right to remain silent in the Twilight Zone. All of your constitutional rights have been temporarily canceled. You have no lawyer. All right? We set to continue our discussion, fuckhead?

  FERRANO: Shit, man. My tooth's broken. Gimme a break for… Awhh, shit, man.

  CARROLL: I'm trying to give you every break in the world. Don't you understand anything yet? What this is here? What's happening?… Somebody stole money from the man. Some very important people are severely pissed off. Big, big people. Why don't you imagine that this is Vietnam and you're the Vietcong? Would that help you?

  FERRANO: Wait a minute! I didn't do anything!

  CARROLL: No? You sell pump-action shotguns, revolvers, to fourteen- and fifteen-year-old kids. Black, P.R., Chinese kids in gangs. I'm not gonna say any more than that… Your lawyer is a Mr. Joseph Rao of 24 Park Avenue. Mr. Rao doesn't want any part of this… I think you better tell me everything you've heard on the street.

  FERRANO: Look. I'll tell you what I know. I can't tell you what I don't know.

  CARROLL: That I can buy.

  FERRANO: All right, I heard there was some heavy artillery available. In the city. This was about, beginning, I guess, maybe middle of November. Yean five weeks ago.

  CARROLL: How heavy are we talking about?

  FERRANO: Like M-60s. Like M-79 rocket launchers. Soviet RPD light machine guns. SKS automatics. That kinda stuff. Heavy! I mean, what the fuck they gonna do with that kind of munitions? That's basic ground-assault equipment. Like in ' Nam. What you'd use, take over a country. That's all I heard… I'm telling the truth, Carroll… Hey, tha
t's all anybody knows on the street… Awhh, c'mon, don'tcha believe me?… Hey! Seriously!

  CARROLL: Tell me what you know about François Monserrat…

  FERRANO: He ain't Italian.

  CARROLL: Mr. Ferrano, thank you so much for your help. Now get out of my office, please. Mr. Caruso will show you to the nearest rathole.

  From a transcript taken in room 312; number 13 Wall.

  Present: Arch Carroll; Muhammed Saalam.

  CARROLL: Hello there, Mr. Saalam. Haven't seen you since you had Percy Ellis killed on 103rd Street. Very nice djellaba. Sip of Irish whiskey?

  SAALAM: Liquor is against my religious belief.

  CARROLL: This is Irish whiskey. It's blessed. Well, we'll get right down to official police business, then. Tell me, uh, are you a hunter, Mr. Saalam?

  SAALAM (laughs): No, not really. A hunter?… Actually, if you stop to think about it, I'm a huntee. Ever since I fought for you whites in Southeast Asia. My name is Sah-lahm, by the way.

  CARROLL: Sah-lahm. I'm sorry… No, you see, I thought you must be a hunter. Something like that. You see, we found all of these hunting guns, these hunting bombs, in your apartment up in Yonkers, M-23 squirrel-hunting guns. Opossum-hunting sniper rifles, the ones with star nightscopes. Chipmunk-hunting fragmentation grenades. B-40 duck-hunting rockets.

  SAALAM: You bust into my place?

  CARROLL: Had to. What do you know about a Mr. François Monserrat?

  SAALAM: You had a warrant from a judge?

  CARROLL: Well, we couldn't get an official warrant. We did talk to a judge off the record. He said don't get caught. We took it from there.

  SAALAM: No search warrant or nothing?

  CARROLL: You know, this is really shocking. Didn't anybody read that Time magazine story on me? Little squared-off red box thing? Doesn't anybody understand who I am? I'm a terrorist! Just like you guys… I don't play by international Red Cross of Switzerland agreements. Mr. Saalam, you sold some M-23 squirrel-hunting guns, also some quail-hunting sniper rifles to a couple of fellas. About six weeks ago. Who… are… they?…

  (Long pause.) “Uh-oh. Uh-oh… Mr. Saalam, please let me explain something else to you. Explain this as clearly as I can… You're a bright, U.S. college-educated terrorist. You went to Howard University for a year; you did a little time in Attica. You're one of the Mark Rudd-Eldridge Cleaver-Kathy Boudin school… Me, on the other hand, I'm a terrorist of the PLO-Red Brigade-Blow-away-anything-that-moves school… Now then. You sold a full case of stolen M-23s on or about November 1. That's a fact we both know about. Now say-Yes, I did, or I'll break your right hand. Just say Yes, I did…