Rupert narrated the extraordinary procedures that had been part of his leave-taking from the agency. He’d had to sign a series of oaths, contracts and quitclaims promising in several dozen different ways that he would never, ever, violate his secrecy agreements by disclosing any aspects of his work at the agency. Violation of these promises would render him the legal equivalent of roadkill—allowing the agency to seize any and all income he had received, confiscate his property, seek recovery of additional money from his heirs and assigns. The departure paperwork ran to nearly a hundred pages. But Cohen had signed it all.

“Now that you’re a journalist,” I said, “where do you plan to practice the craft?”

“Hard Copy!” he said. “I pitched them an idea for a Washington segment I’d do every night. A sort of update on political gossip, conspiracy theories, dirt from all over. We’re going to call it The Hatchet Man. That’s the gimmick, see. I’m the Hatchet Man. I go on the air every night looking spooky as hell and I dish all this stuff out—some of it true, some maybe true, all of it interesting—and the audience sits there stoned, wondering What the fuck is this? It’ll make fabulous television. Sort of like combining Cops with Nightline. I mean, how can that miss? That is what America has been waiting for. The country is tired of David Gergen. People are ready for the Hatchet Man. Am I right, Eric? Am I fucking right?”

Before I left, I went to see George Dirk at his new office in Arlington. It was in a modern-looking building near a metro stop. The office looked more like a trading room on Wall Street than a normal newsroom. There were monitors recording instant price movement of stocks and bonds around the world; special commodities wires that transmitted the latest computer forecasts of expected weather patterns; analytic models that mimicked the operations of government forecasters at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve.

Dirk was at one of these desks, surrounded by screens displaying obscure financial information. He had his feet up when I arrived, and he was talking on the phone with one of his confidants. “Gotta go,” he said into the phone as soon as he saw me. I took him to a noisy bar across the street. A group of beefy guys were watching a basketball game on television and screaming every time someone scored. We found a table in the back.