“Dirk is a lunatic. But he’s right about Press Alert. These people are poisonous. They will wreck the paper. You’ve got to get them out, as quickly as you can.”

Sellinger’s eyes went wide, almost as if he were about to cry. “You don’t seem to understand, Eric. We have no money. The Mirror is hanging by a thread. If we push out our only new source of capital, we will be forced into bankruptcy. The paper will be sold. Your friends will all lose their jobs. This ship will sink.”

“Mr. Sellinger, these people killed your best friend, Arthur Bowman. Do you realize that?”

A ghostly look came over Sellinger’s face. His skin lost what little color it had; his eyes turned hard and bitter. “I suspected it,” he said. “I didn’t dare ask you, after you returned from Beijing. But I knew how apprehensive Arthur had been about Bézy, and I wondered if he might have played a role in Arthur’s death.”

“Bézy will kill the newspaper, too. You don’t have a choice, Mr. Sellinger. You must go to the board and tell them what you’ve learned from Dirk, and then go to the SEC. These people are doing illegal things. If you don’t act quickly, they’ll take the Mirror down with them.”

“What should I do?” asked Sellinger.

“I’m just an ex-employee, and not renowned for my good judgment,” I said. “But I’d suggest that you start by calling George Dirk and telling him to come to New York right away—to brief the board of directors about what he has discovered.”

42

42

Ed Weiss summoned all his journalistic powers to keep the lid on my story. He called the editor of the Times and invited him to lunch. It happened they were old friends from Southeast Asia, too. He and Weiss and Bowman had once shared the same faithful translator, who turned out to be a Viet Cong agent. Over lunch, Weiss leveled with him—that was the essential bond among journalists, that we would tell each other the truth, even when we couldn’t inform the wider world. He told the Times man so much about me and Arthur and the CIA that the poor fellow was in an impossible situation. Before, he hadn’t known enough to publish a story. Now, he knew too much.