It took only a few hours to write the story. I had been gathering string for nearly a week, so I already had most of the information I needed. And I figured that time was now working against me. The longer I waited before putting the information in print, the more vulnerable I would be. I started by calling United Airlines and booking two seats for their flight to New York the next day; I also made a reservation at a hotel in Manhattan for the following night. I hoped these steps would mislead the DST officers who were undoubtedly listening in on my phone calls into believing that I was bailing out. Then I sat down at my laptop computer and wrote a lead.

Paris, May 28—French defense minister Maurice Costa personally authorized a $200 million payment to associates of the Vert/Vertu terrorist group that seized Taillevent restaurant two weeks ago as part of a secret deal to release 15 hostages, according to authoritative sources.

The payment was part of a broader financial package that will provide prominent West African political figures who sponsored the Vert/Vertu terrorist operation with at least $1 billion in secret funds over the next five years, another informed source said.

The story went on like that for another two thousand words. It wrote itself. The top of a newspaper story is like a hanger in a closet. If it’s weak or off center, it won’t support anything. But if it’s solid, you can hang a ton of information on it, and it will all lie flat and straight.

I spent that night back at my apartment, fact-checking the story—going over every detail and thinking how we would defend ourselves against any libel claims that might be brought against the paper. Lawsuits were probably the least of my worries, but they were the only ones I could protect against. When I was done with the checking, I printed out a copy of the story. I then composed a long memo for Weiss, summarizing in detail my sourcing for the story. I attached a copy of the transcript of the phone conversation between Costa and Daghestani, and put everything in an envelope with Weiss’s name on it. Finally I deleted the files from the hard drive of my computer, so that there would be no other record of them.