There was also the small matter of the quality of the dirt and dust thickly caked on his ankles, on his exposed toes. It was all a little too perfect. It was almost as if it might actually be black Kiwi shoe polish-shoe polish carefully applied to look like dirt.

The conclusion was obvious after a careful and close look at the street bum. Crusader Rabbit was some kind of undercover New York cop on a stakeout…

Which Crusader Rabbit truly was.

His real name was Archer Carroll, and he was currently the chief terrorist deterrent in the United States. He had been on a stakeout for five weeks, with no end in sight.

Meanwhile, across the busy Brooklyn street, inside the Sinbad Star restaurant, two Iraqi men in their early thirties were sampling what they believed to be the finest Middle Eastern cooking available in New York City. They were the objects of Arch Carroll's long and painful stakeout.

The Iraqi men had purposely chosen a rear alcove of the small, cozy restaurant, where they noisily slurped thick carob bean soup. They gobbled up mint-flecked tabbouleh and cream-colored hummus. They eagerly munched greasy mixtures of raisins, pine nuts, lamb, Moroccan olives, their favorite things to eat in the world.

As they savored the delectable food, Wadih and Anton Rashid were also immensely enjoying their official American immunity from criminal prosecution and harassment, something guaranteed them by the FBI. On the strictest orders from Washington, the two brothers, admitted Third World terrorists, were to be treated like foreign diplomats on UN duty in New York. In return, three marines, convicted “spies,” were soon to be released from a Lebanese jail.

New York and federal police authorities were permitted to act against the Rashid brothers only if the Black September killers actually moved to endanger property or life in the United States. These, of course, were two of their favorite avocations in past residences: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Paris, Beirut, and most recently London, where they had coldbloodedly murdered three young women, college-age daughters of Lebanese politicians, in a Chelsea sweetshop.