“Then help. You have to understand how risky this is for me, Rupert. Bowman is one of the most prominent reporters in the business, and I’m not going to accuse him of anything unless I’m sure about it. You’re telling me he’s a foreign agent, which scares the hell out of me, to be honest, but what do you really know? Where did you first hear about Bowman?”

“Corridor talk.”

“What’s that?”

“Just what it sounds like. People talking in the corridor. We’re a loquacious bunch, if you hadn’t noticed. An old-timer in EUR mentioned to me a few years ago that the French were a tad close to a very prominent reporter, and the organization had looked into it once upon a time, and then they had dropped it. I asked who, and he gave me Bowman’s name. We were just shooting the shit, and I didn’t think too much about it. But I filed it away.

“And then one morning last year I was having coffee with a French counterpart in Rome. He was a bright fellow, as evidenced by the fact that he disliked his service almost as much as I loathed the organization. We’re sitting together in a café in Rome, reading the morning papers and trying to recover from a hangover inflicted the night before at an African dance club. And I come across this absurd column in the International Herald Tribune by Bowman about how tough-minded French policy had been in the Balkans, and how much better it was than anything coming out of the White House. It was a blow job, pardon my French.

“So I read it out loud to my French friend, and he just laughed and said, ‘Our man in Washington.’ And he meant it.”

“Did you tell the agency?”

“Of course not. I don’t tell them anything that’s serious. They would just screw things up. No. I told you.”

My head hurt. I needed to know more, or I needed to know less. Where I was—in between—was the wrong place to be. “This is all very interesting, but for my purposes it’s useless. We’ve been down this road before, you and me. I need to know real facts. I can’t go to my editors unless I know who gave this China story to Bowman. Was it one of his French sources, or a French intelligence officer?”

“What’s the difference?”

“You don’t get it. There’s all the difference in the world between someone who gives you something because you’re a reporter and someone who gives it to you because you’re his paid agent. If it’s the former, then Bowman is just doing his job. He should get a Pulitzer Prize. If it’s the latter, then he should be fired. I have to know which it is.”