“That’s what they’re focusing on,” said Strasser, suddenly beside her at the bar. “The story’s developed into a hunt for the origin of the surveillance, the identity of the puppet master, and other important government figures described in colorful code words in the Oval Office conversations. It’s a roman à clef.”

Writing, Adam didn’t give a flip for writing. Being first, that was what he knew. News was fresh. If it wasn’t, it wasn’t news. It was history, the lazy man’s way. He read history, naturally. But when he thought of all the time a historian had to look into an event—it just didn’t impress Adam that a well-funded, highly educated, universally esteemed individual found out something much closer to the truth than a daily newspaperman did. The historian examined a reality about which memoirs had been written, archives opened, stakes lowered. All it took was patience. To Adam, it didn’t matter by the time the adjective “painstaking” was a word of praise. It wouldn’t change policy. It wouldn’t have impact.

When anyone wrote a letter for a prize entry, which he used to do but now delegated, “impact” was the word. The trick was to get the investigative work done early in a year, so there would be observable impact before year’s end. Impact after that—it couldn’t be included in the letter accompanying the work, and so it was good, excellent, in fact, but less excellent than impact during the calendar year. You needed indictments, a congressional hearing, a regulation revision, a protest outside an institution that led to the beginning of talk of reform. He did not speak about this. He would not want to be accused of prize chasing.

But being first, it had meaning. He had stopped examining the assumption. It would have to be enough.

So, when he didn’t see a top for the story about the report, and when he asked Martina after the two o’clock where it was, and she said Mitch was busy on the phone continuously, he worried. Actually, he was suspicious. He’d presided over enough pastings in his career to know the signs of being whipped by the competition. It often began with the top not materializing by three o’clock.

So here it was four-thirty in the afternoon, and still no top. Adam could not sit at his desk. He tried to see if Stanley was out there. He couldn’t see past the first line of desks. Why did everyone seem to be standing at this hour? They should be on the phone, or better, out on the streets, in the field, anywhere but here. Phoning a story in, that was the way it was done when he’d started. You were out in the world. Today, they sat at desks in the Room, attached to headsets attached to phones. They were all wordsmiths now, looking for book contracts.