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By Root 521 0

yet?" from Rafi and Zuhayr in the backseat, to the point that more than once he considered pulling the car over and strangling them. Maybe it was hard sitting in the backseat, but he had to drive this Goddamned car!!! Tension. He was feeling it, and they probably were, too, and so he took a deep breath and commanded himself to be calm. The end of their journey was hardly four hours away, and what was that compared to their transcontinental trek? Certainly it was farther than the Holy Prophet ever walked or rode from Mecca to Medina and back-but he stopped that thought at once. He had no standing to compare himself with Mohammed, did he? No, you do not. One thing he was sure of. On getting to his destination, he was going to bathe and sleep just as long as he could. Four hours to rest was what he kept saying to himself, as Abdullah slept in the right-front seat.

The Campus had its own cafeteria, whose food was catered from a variety of outside sources. Today it was from a Baltimore deli called Atman's whose corned beef was pretty good, if not quite New York class-saying that might result in a fistfight, he thought, as he picked up a corned beef on a kaiser roll. What to drink? If he was having a New York lunch, then cream soda, but Utz, the local potato chips, of course, because they'd even had them in the White House-at his father's insistence. They probably had something from Boston there now. It was not exactly a renowned restaurant town, but every city has at least one good eatery, even Washington, D.C.

Tony Wills, his normal luncheon mate, was nowhere to be seen. So, he looked around and spotted Dave Cunningham, not surprisingly eating alone. Jack headed that way.

"Hey, Dave, mind if I sit down?" he asked.

"Take a seat," Cunningham said, cordially enough.

"How's the numbers business?"

"Exciting," was the implausible reply. Then he elaborated. "You know, the access we have into those European banks is amazing. If the Department of justice had this sort of access, they'd really clean up-except you can't introduce this kind of evidence into a court of law-"

"Yeah, Dave, the Constitution can really be a drag. And all those damned civil-rights laws."

Cunningham nearly choked on his egg salad on white. "Don't you start. The FBI runs a lot of operations that are a little shady-usually because some informant lays stuff on us, maybe because somebody asked, or maybe not, and they spin that off-but within the rules of criminal procedure. Usually it's part of a plea bargain. There are not enough crooked lawyers to handle all of their needs. The Mafia guys, I mean."

"I know Pat Martin. Dad thinks a lot of him."

"He's honest and very, very smart. He really ought to be a judge. That's where honest lawyers belong."

"Doesn't pay very much." Jack's official salary at The Campus was well above anything any federal employee made. Not bad for entry level.

"That is a problem, but-"

"But there's nothing all that admirable about poverty, my dad says. He toyed with the idea of zeroing out salaries for elected officials so that they'd have to know what real work was, but he eventually decided that it would make them even more susceptible to bribery."

The accountant picked up on that: "You know, Jack, it's amazing how little you need to bribe a member of Congress. Makes the bribes hard to identify," the CPA groused. "Like being down in the weeds for an aircraft."

"What about our terrorist friends?"

"Some of them like a comfortable life. A lot of them come from moneyed families, and they like their luxuries."

"Like Sali."

Dave nodded. "He has expensive tastes. His car costs a lot of money. Very impractical. The mileage it gets must be awful, especially in a city like London. The gas prices over there are pretty steep."

"But mainly he takes cabs."

"He can afford it. It probably makes sense. Parking a car in the financial district must be costly, too, and the cabs in London are good." He looked up. "You know that. You've been to London a lot."

"Some," Jack agreed. "Nice city, nice people." He didn't have to add that a protective