“You got it. And what’s even more scary, the heavy trading began a little after we got the feed at seven-thirty. Here, I’ll show you.”

Dirk took the keyboard of his Bloomberg terminal and punched in some symbols. “Check it out,” he said. “This shows trading in U.S. Treasuries in Tokyo over the last hour. Notice anything strange?”

“Yeah, prices are falling off a cliff.” The Bloomberg price chart showed a steep fall that began just after seven-thirty P.M., New York time. Prices for thirty-year Treasuries had fallen a full two points in the last hour. That was a huge drop. Bond prices are measured in one thirty-second increments, each of which is called a “tick.” That meant prices had fallen sixty-four ticks in an hour, as traders at each of the major bond houses began to revalue their huge inventories. Bond yields—which are the effective interest rates the bonds pay, based on those prices—were shooting up, correspondingly.

“Look here!” said Dirk, pointing to a new screen with quotes from other Asian markets. “The same thing is happening in Singapore, and in Hong Kong. And the dollar is getting hammered on all those exchanges, too.” He called up another screen that summarized trading on Asian monetary exchanges. “Check this out!” he said, pointing to the bottom of the screen to a headline for a Bloomberg Business News bulletin on the bond market. The headline read: BOND SELL-OFF SPARKED BY FED RESIGNATION RUMOR.

Dirk punched another button and the lead paragraph of a news story flashed on the screen: “Analysts attributed a sharp slide in prices of U.S. Treasury securities in trading early Friday in Asian markets to rumors that The New York Mirror will publish a story Friday saying that the chairman of the Federal Reserve will resign next week.” I studied the two flickering screens: cause and effect.

“Bingo!” said Dirk.

“Strong circumstantial evidence,” I said, “but it doesn’t prove that the leak came from our colleagues at Press Alert. It could be any doofus copy editor in New York.”

“If this was an isolated example, Eric, I might agree with you. But it’s not. I’ve been collecting others. Last week, Mirror Alert had a story predicting that the April unemployment number would be a lot lower than people had been expecting. God only knows who our sources were for that story, but it turned out to be right. We ran it—officially—at ten in the morning. But the night before, there was heavy selling of U.S. Treasuries in Singapore. Now, I can’t prove to you the traders were basing their moves on an early look at our story, but I am morally certain of it.”

I looked over to the editors’ bull pen. The lone editor in residence was at that moment picking his nose. “Who are these guys, anyway?”