“What it is to be a celebrity.” Murph shook his head. “Hey, there was this cool video that Brad Paisley did, about being a celebrity...!”

“I saw it. Thanks,” she said, waving the notes at him. She picked up her purse and left the building, just avoiding her editor on the way out the door.

Apparently the news media had found somebody in Jacobsville who was willing to talk to them. She wondered with droll cynicism what the informant had been paid.

She discovered that if she agreed to do an exclusive interview with just one station, the others would have to leave her alone. Before she signed any papers, she spoke with an attorney and had him check out the agreement.

“It says that I agree to tell them my story,” she said.

“Exactly,” he replied.

She pursed her lips. “It doesn’t specify which story.”

“I think they’ll assume it means the story they want to hear,” he replied. “Although that’s implied rather than stated.”

“Ah.”

“And I would advise caution when they ask you to name the person overseas whom your newspaper provided as a reference regarding the informer,” he added. “That may be a protected source.”

“I was hoping you’d notice that. It is a protected source.”

He only smiled.

She sat down in front of the television cameras with a well-known, folksy interviewer who was calm, gentle and very intelligent. He didn’t press her for details she couldn’t give, and he understood that some sources of information that she had access to were protected.

“I understand from what you told our correspondent that you don’t believe the men in question actually perpetrated the attack, which resulted in the deaths of several women and small children,” he began.

“That’s correct.”

“Would you tell me why?”

“When I first broke the story, I went on the assumption that because the majority of the interviewees placed the blame on the American mercenaries, they must be guilty. There was, however, one conflicting opinion. A villager, whom I cannot name, said that extortion was involved and that money was demanded for the protection of foreign workers. When a relative of the extortionist threatened to go to the authorities and reveal the financial aspect, he and his family were brutally murdered as a warning. These murders were blamed on the Americans who had, in fact, been working for the government trying to uncover a nest of terrorists threatening American oil company employees there.”

The interviewer was frowning. “Then the massacre was, in fact, retaliation for the villager’s threat to expose the extortionist.”

“That is my information, yes.”

He studied a sheet of paper. “I see here that the newspaper which employs you used its own foreign sources to do interviews about this story.”

“Those sources are also protected,” Michelle replied. “I can’t name them.”