“All right, my friend,” said Cohen as the food began to arrive. “You’ve put me off long enough. What about my job?” When do I start?” The time had run out.

“I did what I promised,” I said carefully. “I talked to my bureau chief, Bob Marcus. I told him I knew someone at the agency who wanted to work for the Mirror.”

“Right, and what did he say?”

“He said it’s a nonstarter. He said intelligence and journalism don’t mix.”

“They don’t mix?”

“Yes. He said it was an ethics issue. It would compromise the paper’s reputation if we hired a former intelligence officer. People might mistrust our coverage. I’m sorry, but that’s what he said.”

“I see.” Rupert had a strange, flinty look, as if he was trying to decide whether to tell me something. “So the Mirror can’t hire me, because you don’t hire spies. Is that it?”

“That’s right. We don’t hire spies.” He was goading me, but I didn’t understand why.

“Bullshit!” he snorted. “Of course you do. You just don’t hire CIA spies.”

“What are you talking about?”

Rupert paused a moment, looked at the four corners of the restaurant, and then gave me a devilish look that made instantly clear what had motivated him to join the secret world.

“My dear fellow,” he whispered, “you have a foreign agent working in your Washington bureau at this very moment. I was speaking of him, in the abstract, a few minutes ago. He has been paid a considerable sum over the years by the very nation we were discussing earlier, our great and distinguished ally, France.”

“Who the hell are you talking about?”

His eyes twinkled as he spoke the name: “Arthur Bowman.”

16

16

I watched Bowman settle in at his computer terminal the next morning as he began work on his weekly column on foreign affairs. It was the day after the big snow, and he was getting an early start. He looked so comfortable. His gray hair was still slick from his morning shower; his cheeks were pink and smooth. A pair of reading glasses was perched on his nose; he was looking over them to the screen. Atop his desk stood a Dundee marmalade jar containing a brace of sharpened pencils; occasionally he would reach for one and make a note on his pad. Other times he would seem to be searching for an idea, and would stare absently at the gallery of photographs along the wall, as if communing with the spirits of his departed ancestors. What was he writing about today? The inconstancy of American policy in Bosnia, the indispensability of the Atlantic Alliance, the essential American interest in free trade? I didn’t have to know, to know. It was all of a piece, another few inches in the tapestry he and the ancestors had been weaving for the past fifty years.