Weiss cracked a thin smile, the way he used to when I told him about some outrageous story I had been working on. “Shit!” he said. “This is the craziest yarn I ever heard. Have you lost your marbles, Eric?”

“It’s all true. It will take a while to really explain all of it. And there’s more that I haven’t told you, that I need to tell Mr. Sellinger about first. But you’ll see. It’s all true. You may not agree that I did the right thing, but you’ll at least understand how it happened.”

“Maybe so,” said Weiss, “but right now we have some business to do.”

Weiss summoned the lawyers, and I went through the story again. The only part I left out was Bézy’s role in Press Alert, and his $500 million investment in the Mirror. Weiss and the lawyers listened carefully enough to what I said, and made notes. But they didn’t really seem engaged until we began going over the pictures of me and the various CIA officers.

It was quite a gallery: Rupert Cohen, Tom Rubino, Roger Navarre, Frank Jones, the FBI commander in Boston. They held up each picture and asked me to identify the other person and explain what I was doing with him. My answers seemed to track Bézy’s written explanation closely, picture by picture. He had done a good job in writing it up, but, then, he’d had good material to work with.

When we got to the picture of me and Navarre, the French biochemist, Bézy’s explanation apparently had been skimpier, leaving out any mention of the biological-weapons research. When I described my role in the CIA operation that had helped Navarre escape from China and brought him to the United States, Weiss shook his head.

“You did that?” he said. “You’ve got balls. I’ll say that much for you.”

The lawyers looked uncomfortable, as if they didn’t want him to say anything nice to me. They were negotiating my departure.

When we’d finished going through the pictures, I handed Weiss one more nail for my coffin. It didn’t matter to me anymore—I was halfway out the door—but I wanted him to know. I said Rubino had told me, before I went to China, that he had obtained a special waiver from a presidential executive order that bans the use of U.S. journalist in intelligence operations.

“Jesus, Eric!” said Weiss, shaking his head. “Why did you do it?” He wasn’t angry anymore. He was tired, and sad. He’d always liked me. I had been his favorite, his hope for the future. And now I had fucked up so totally that I was, professionally speaking, a dead man.

“At the time,” I repeated, “I thought it was the right thing.”