I looked at the pictures that stared up from the coffee table. They had the grainy quality of celebrity photos that are shot through telephoto lenses, like the pictures of Princess Diana in bikini bathing suits that appear in the supermarket tabloids. The first was a shot of me and Tom Rubino in a café on a Paris street corner; the second showed me and Rupert Cohen leaving Au Cochon d’Or in Paris; the third caught me and Cohen at a bar in Adams-Morgan; the fourth showed my car parked in front of Tom Rubino’s house in Maryland; the fifth had been taken by a security camera in the hall of Building N-16 at Qinghua University, showing me talking with Roger Navarre; the sixth showed me and Frank Jones sitting next to each other in his Chevy Impala; the last was of me talking with the FBI commander on the dock at Logan Airport a few hours before. It was an impressive dossier, cataloguing my contacts with the agency. The only spot they seemed to have missed was the safe house in Shirlington.

“Good work, wouldn’t you say? We are not so good as the CIA, but we are not so bad, either. We have a great advantage, which is that everyone underestimates us. We have worked hard on the written explanation that will accompany the photographs, too. And we have one more piece of evidence. Alessi! Bring the vest.”

Alessi entered the room again, this time carrying the Kevlar vest I had discarded in the toilet compartment of the airplane. He laid it on the table, next to the pictures.

“They do not ordinarily give these to journalists, I think. Alessi tells me it is an unusual model, made especially for the FBI. That will be helpful. We’ll add it to our report.”

Bézy sat back in his chair, supremely content. He had done a careful job. There was no disputing the fact that he had the evidence to destroy my career and severely embarrass the paper.

“Perhaps you would like some time to think about it,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered. “I need some time.”

The Frenchman said he would give me until the next morning. He had to speak to Peyron in Paris before he did anything, and it was too late to call him now. He said he had booked a nice room for me in the hotel—fit for a future editor! But he warned that I shouldn’t imagine I would gain anything from the delay, or from any foolish attempt to escape. The documents would be in New York the next day, regardless. They would be delivered to the Mirror and the Times at noon if I refused Bézy’s offer.

“From your situation, there is no escape,” Bézy said slowly. “We would like you to be our colleague, but if we cannot have that, we are indifferent to your fate.”