Cam eagerly took Tim into the office of Florence Geary. Tim was a former CIA agent and an old acquaintance of Florence’s. As always, he had his hair cut as if he were still in the army, and today he wore a safari suit that was as close to a military uniform as civilian dress could get.

“We’re going to work with foreign nationals,” Tim explained. “There will be three teams, each of five men. They won’t be CIA employees and they won’t even be Americans. But the Agency will train them, equip them, and arrange finance.”

Florence nodded. “And what will these teams do?” she said neutrally.

“The idea is to get to the kidnappers before they strike,” Tim said. “When we know that they’re planning a kidnapping, or a bombing, or any other kind of terrorist act—we will direct one of the teams to go in and eliminate the perpetrators.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Florence. “These teams will kill terrorists before they commit crimes.”

She was not as excited by the plan as Cam was, evidently, and he had a bad feeling.

“Exactly,” said Tim.

“I have one question,” said Florence. “Are you two out of your fucking minds?”

Cam was outraged. How could Florence be against this?

Tim said indignantly: “I know it’s unconventional—”

“Unconventional?” Florence interrupted. “By the laws of every civilized country it’s murder. There is no due process, there is no requirement of proof, and by your own admission the people you’re targeting may have done nothing more than merely think about committing crimes.”

Cam said: “Actually, it’s not murder. We’d be acting like a cop who gets off an early shot at a criminal who is pointing a gun at him. It’s called preemptive self-defense.”

“So you’re a lawyer, now, Cam.”

“That’s not my opinion, it’s Sporkin’s.” Stanley Sporkin was the CIA general counsel.

“Well, Stan’s wrong,” said Florence. “Because we never see a pointed gun. We have no way of knowing who is about to commit a terrorist act. We don’t have intelligence of that quality in Lebanon—we never have. So we’ll end up killing people who we think might be planning terrorism.”

“Perhaps we can improve the reliability of our information.”

“What about the reliability of the foreign nationals? Who will be on these five-man teams? Local Beirut bad guys? Mercenaries? International-security-company Eurotrash? How can you trust them? How can you control them? Yet whatever they do will be our responsibility—especially if they kill innocent people!”

Tim said: “No, no—the whole operation will be arm’s-length and deniable.”

“It doesn’t sound very deniable to me. The CIA is going to train and equip them and finance their activities. And have you thought of the political consequences?”

“Fewer kidnappings and bombings.”

“How can you be so naïve? If we strike at Hezbollah this way, you think they will sit back and say: ‘Gosh, the Americans are tougher than we thought, maybe we’d better give up this whole terrorism idea.’ No, no. They will be screaming for revenge! In the Middle East, violence always begets more violence—haven’t you learned that yet? Hezbollah bombed the marine corps barracks in Beirut—why? According to Colonel Geraghty, who was the marine commander at the time, it was in response to the U.S. Sixth Fleet shelling innocent Muslims in the village of Suq al-Gharb. One atrocity brings another.”