with salt-and-pepper hair. Since early spring, they had been meeting secretly in a small conference room at the UN.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

Yes, she said, she was fine.

The attack was a terrible tragedy, he said, doubtless the work of Al Qaeda.

"I hope that we can still work together," he said.

Brian Berman

That same day, in Washington, on the seventh floor of the State Department building, a security guard opened the door of Leverett's office and told him they were evacuating the building. Leverett was Powell's specialist on terrorist states like Syria and Libya, so he knew the world was about to go through a dramatic change. As he joined the people milling on the sidewalk, his mind was already racing.

Then he got a call summoning him back toFoggy Bottom. At the entrance to a specially fortified office, he showed his badge to the guards and passed into a windowless conference room. There were about a dozen people there, Powell's top foreign-policy planners. Powell told them that their first job was to make plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The second job was to rally allies. That meant detailed strategies for approaching other nations -- in some cases, Powell could make the approach, in others the president would have to make the call. Then Powell left them to work through the night.

At 5:30 a.m. on September 12, they walked the list to the office of the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage. Powell took it straight to the White House.

Mann and Leverett didn't know