“Okay,” I said, putting the notebook back in my coat pocket. I didn’t care. I would make notes in the car later.

“I’ll start with a riddle: What could the French offer the Chinese that we would never, ever, give them?”

“Weapons,” I said. That had to be the right answer.

“Sure, weapons. But what kind? Name the weapons that will be for the twenty-first century what nuclear weapons have been for the twentieth century? Name the weapons that will give the world’s most populous nation a vast strategic advantage over anybody else?”

“That’s not my area. I really don’t know.”

“Biological weapons. A whole new generation of weapons that will use gene-splicing technology and recombinant-DNA technology. Weapons that will make you stupid, or crazy, or tired, or lazy. Or dead. That’s what makes this so scary. We think that for the past year or two, the French have been sharing some very specialized biotechnology with the Chinese that could be used to make weapons. It’s unofficial, done through a private company. But we think they’re doing it deliberately, to cement the political and economic relationship. It’s a sweetener. The payoff is the communications contract, and all the contracts that come after that. The price is unprecedented Chinese military power. And it scares the hell out of me.”

Rubino fell silent. He leaned back in his chair again, to let me think about what he had said.

“I don’t blame you for being scared,” I said. “This makes everything else seem like a sideshow. What are you doing about it?”

“We’re working the case, but we have our problems. The guy who got our five-million-dollar bribe was one of the top officials in the Chinese intelligence service. We’d been using him to keep tabs on this mess, but the French and the Chinese got to him and he ratted us out. I’ll be honest with you, we don’t have much on the ground. But we have gathered a few useful tidbits that we might be willing to share with an interested reporter.” He patted his briefing book. “Are you interested?”

I should have thought about it carefully before answering. Accepting his offer would draw us closer together, and make it easier for him to ask a favor in return someday. But most reporters aren’t wired that way. When we’re working a source, the test we apply isn’t very subtle or farsighted. We ask whether we—which we like to think means our readers—will get more out of an exchange than the source. If the answer is yes, we don’t think too much about the rest.

“Sure, I’m interested,” I said. “What have you got?”