“What’s the best story you ever wrote?” he asked at one point. I had to think. They all were heaped together in my mind, like so many newspapers thrown onto a pile on the floor. I told him about a project I had done in Lebanon in 1983, when I had just arrived and wanted to understand how the place worked. I had spent a week interviewing Christians and Muslims in two villages that lay across a ravine in the Chouf mountains. The villages had been fighting for a century, and I wanted to know why. The answer, I discovered, was that the villagers didn’t know why. They just knew that they hated each other.

“Why did they talk to you?” Rubino asked.

“I don’t know. Why people tell things to reporters is one of life’s great mysteries. I’ve never really understood it. I suppose it’s because they need to tell somebody, and we’re willing to listen. We use them for our own purposes, which they don’t always understand.”

I wanted to turn the question back to him. “What’s your answer?” I asked. “Why do people agree to become CIA agents? Why do they talk to you, when it means taking such big risks?”

Rubino averted his eyes. I had asked the magician how he did his tricks. “Most good agents recruit themselves,” he said. “It’s not the money, or the pressure. They do it because they believe in it.”

Rubino’s wife brought lunch downstairs on TV trays. She had fixed cheeseburgers, with microwaved French fries. I wondered how many times she had done this over the years they had been married: brought food down to her husband while he did his spooky business with someone she’d never met before and probably wouldn’t meet again.

“Tell me about the China trip,” he said eagerly. I explained that I would be leaving in several weeks with Arthur Bowman—I didn’t say how we had come to be such friends all of a sudden, but I suspect he had a good idea—and that I would be covering a special symposium in Beijing organized by Alain Peyron.

Rubino already seemed to know all about it; he said Michel Bézy would be there, too. I had the sense then, as I had in past dealings with Rubino and Rupert Cohen, that their possession of secret information allowed them to exert a kind of power over me. I had resisted that pull as best I could, but I was weakening. Rubino was pulling me in a direction I wanted to go, anyway.

“I want to make this trip count,” I said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I thought about what you mentioned at Langley—the biological-weapons research—and I wondered whether I could investigate it while I’m in China.”