Now Calvin swung him around and pushed him toward the exit. Lane slipped on beer and broken glass. I reached out in time to steady him.

“Richard,” I said, “cool it.”

I found myself holding Lane about the shoulders. He cowered into me. When Calvin tried lunging at him again, I thrust myself between them. The bartender came around and told Calvin to get the hell out, and the reporter, with a furious glance at his colleagues, abandoned the pub.

I let go of Lane and he rushed to the bathroom. I don’t know why I went after him—maybe because it didn’t seem like anyone else would. I found him in the back hallway. It looked like he was hyperventilating. When I put my hands on him again, he was hot to the touch, his cotton shirt damp with sweat.

“You alright?”

He nodded, then smeared water from his eyes. “I’m crying.”

“He’s a big guy.”

“Did you want me to fight him?”

Now I sensed the rage coursing through him, like a tensing of the veins.

“No,” I said, “of course not.”

“Really?”

To my relief, Gordon Stone came toward us. “That brute is lucky he didn’t speckle my shoes,” he said. “I’d have sent his coordinates to the Taliban.”

9.

The issue hit newsstands to wide acclaim. I spotted it in people’s hands all over the city, the pitch-black cover evoking Pentagon intelligence, secret interrogation sites, perpetual surveillance. Mort considered it one of the finest issues of his career. He thought it had a real chance to move the needle on public opinion. Just ride the subway, he’d say, and look at how many people are reading the Bystander.

One night, shortly before my trip to Colorado to cover the tour of Dr. Kriss’s lab, I was lazing at home with a bottle of wine. I relished these evening hours, when the construction workers had gone home. It was almost rustic to hear traffic noise again.

My phone rang.

“Whitney?”

Roland was calling from Denver, where he was on leave and visiting friends before being redeployed to Turkey.

“The whole army’s on the move,” he told me. “We’re pouring into the Persian Gulf, twenty-four-seven.”

When he said this, it was as if I felt a rush of air thousands of feet above my building, a great migration over the bending earth. I pictured boots trampling the current issue of the magazine. In the end, did it matter how many people read it cover to cover?

“Is it about Iraq?” I said.

“Of course.”

“We’re going to war?”

“No question.”

I asked if that made him nervous.

“It’s Americans who should be nervous. You don’t know the half, Whitney. If Saddam finds a way to get his WMDs—”

“You really think he wants WMDs?”

“Wants? There’s a lot you don’t know.”

“Alright.”