I worked hard on the China story, but it bored me. My actual experience in Beijing had been so powerful, yet what I wrote seemed bloodless and unreal. Partly that reflected the unusual constraints I was operating under, but it also demonstrated the process of denaturing and compression that goes into writing any news story. We need to squeeze enough life out of events to make them lie down flat on the page. We need to chop up the immensity of human experience into pieces that will fit. We are the scorekeepers of life, not the players. We like to imagine that virtue and merit lie with us—the scribes who stay clean on the sidelines—rather than the dirty wretches out on the field.

The truth was, I hated being back in the office. I sat at my computer, trying to concentrate while the usual circus went on—Susan Geekas whining about how awful they were to her at the White House, Amory Small telling his lame sexist jokes, the ceaseless churning of office politics. Ordinarily this was just background noise, but I now found it grating and unpleasant.

My friend George Dirk exploded my balloon of self-disgust with a telephone call. “Hey, asshole!” he said. Unlike most colleagues, Dirk made no effort to be nice to me. “I know you probably don’t have time, what with getting ready to go to New York and take over from Ed Weiss. But you might be interested in talking to us peons over at Mirror Alert, because there are some extremely strange things going on here. One of you Master-of-the-Universe types should probably know about them. The others won’t take my calls, so you’re the lucky one. If you’re not too busy negotiating a book contract or something.”

We met for dinner that night at a run-down steak house in Arlington. There were yellowing autographed pictures on the wall, of Hollywood has-beens and low-life politicians who had visited the restaurant. There was a glossy photo of Rosemary Clooney; a grip-and-grin shot of Congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio; a picture of Chuck Bednarik in his football uniform—all of them bearing messages to the owner, written in the magnanimous style of people who know they will be famous forever.

George eased his large body into a booth. Even though the restaurant was nearly empty, he talked so quietly I could barely hear him. He was at his most conspiratorial that night. He had even made the reservation—for this empty restaurant—under a false name.

“You know me, Eric,” he began. “So you know I’m not the kind of person to make hasty judgments.” Actually, I knew him to be exactly that kind of person, but it didn’t matter. “I have now been working for Mirror Alert for more than a month, and I have to tell you, there is something wrong there. The operation does not pass the George Dirk smell test. You follow me?”