His last comment bothered me; it made me feel like a shill. “Of course I’ll do my own reporting,” I said sharply. “I’m not going to run this stuff just because you told me it’s true.”

“Good luck. You won’t be able to verify all of it, I promise you. Not unless you have an agent inside the Luxembourg Monetary Agency and someone on the cleaning staff of TRC Properties in Bethesda, which manages Gaspard’s office building. But you can probably get enough to convince you it’s true.”

“What about the French-Chinese scheme to develop biological weapons? That sounds like the big story.”

“Not now. Maybe later. Newspaper articles won’t help anybody. They would only drive these guys deeper underground, where we’d never find them. I only told you about the BW angle because I wanted you to understand that this is serious business. There’s a lot at stake.”

“Are we done?” I’d had enough of that small, windowless room. I wanted to get out of there.

“Yes, sir. We are done.” He picked up a phone on the wall and punched in a number, summoning the man from public affairs.

“Just one more thing before you go,” said Rubino. He removed a blank white index card from his pocket and wrote on it two telephone numbers. “If you need to reach me, here are my numbers at home and work. Call me direct, please. Don’t go through public affairs. They don’t know anything about what I just told you.”

21

21

It is a strange fact that when we become passionately involved in something, we stop “thinking” about it. My high school tennis coach was a firm believer in this concept. He was convinced that the conscious mind was the enemy of the body’s natural talents. “Thinking” was what made you blow the easy volley on match point. My coach wanted us to be “no-mind” all the time we were on the court. He wanted us to be the racket, not just the person holding it. I mention this because it explains how I operated in the days immediately after my visit to see Tom Rubino at the CIA. I suppose there were a lot of things I should have been worrying about, but I was no-mind. I wasn’t thinking about the story, I was the story. It was coming at me, racket-high, and all I had to do was hit it cleanly.