I shook my head. The information was so powerful, it took a while for me to register its potential effect. It could bring down the government if it was true. “How do you know that it’s right, Rupert?”

“That is an epistemological question, Eric. How do we know anything? How does our brain confirm the validity of what our eyes see and our ears hear? It could all be an illusion. I know it because I know it.”

“Cut the bullshit. This isn’t an academic exercise. My career is on the line with this story. I have already been arrested and beaten by the French government. I’ve had somebody tell me I’ll get killed if I pursue the story. Now I’m trying to decide whether I can publish anything. I need facts. Not Venetian ghost stories.”

Rupert pulled back from the table. “That was unnecessary,” he said.

“I’m sorry. But I want you to understand the stakes. If I can confirm this story, I’m going to put it in the paper. And all hell is going to break loose.”

Rupert closed his eyes. “God, I wish I were a journalist.” He said it quietly, reverently. I realized in that moment that he would never, in a lifetime in the CIA, have as much power as I did now. And it was obvious that he realized it, too.

“I understand what you need,” he said. He looked carefully around the restaurant, to make sure that nobody was eavesdropping on our conversation, and then dropped his voice to a whisper. “There is a category of information that is known to my colleagues as Special Intelligence, or ‘SI.’ It consists of communications intercepts, telephone taps, surreptitious monitoring of conversations. There are very few things that the United States cannot listen into if it wants. And that is true even inside a friendly allied country, like France.

“So when I say I know things, I am referring to this category of information. It is possible that a record exists that would give you the confirmation you need. Not certain, but possible. But this information is never made available to journalists.”

Then he gave me one of those strange smiles that marked him as a born troublemaker, and suggested that it was time to enjoy the meal.

7

7

The next Monday, after I had put out a few queries to try to confirm parts of what Ali Aziz and Rupert Cohen had told me, I received a call from my friend Olivier at Libération. He asked me to come see him at the paper and said it was urgent. Although I had many other things to do that afternoon, I said I would come right over. It was a half hour by metro to the paper’s offices on Rue Béranger, just off the Place de la République.