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But despite his small circulation, he was passionate about what he did. He loved the chase, the story, the joy of conjuring something from thin air, and as far as he was concerned, there was only one way to find the biggest scoops: instinct. It was a word he drummed into Ruth summer after summer when she had interned at his paper during college. ‘Instinct, Ruthie,’ he’d say. ‘You either got it or you ain’t and it’s something all the fancy journalism schools in the world can’t teach you.’ Well, right now, Ruth’s instinct was telling her she had something. She hoped it wouldn’t let her down, because she desperately needed something right now.
    ‘Ruth, meeting room!’ Chuck Dean, the Trib ’s junior reporter, called as he walked past. ‘Jim wants a catch-up.’
    Ruth rolled her eyes. I bet he does , she thought as she gathered up her notes. Jim had been putting more and more pressure on them to produce ‘significant’ stories, but only Ruth knew why. The problem was, however, that Jim’s sudden enthusiasm for scoops had coincided with a sudden dearth of decent stories. Nothing had appeared on the wire services, nothing much in the national inkies. The July and August holiday months were notorious for being a slow news period, but the past few weeks had seen a particularly dry patch.
    Ruth closed the door behind her and sat in the last chair around the cramped meeting table. If it hadn’t been so pathetic, she would have laughed. When she was growing up, Ruth had always assumed the life of a foreign correspondent would be terribly glamorous – she had imagined herself riding in the back of bullet-scarred jeeps or exchanging war stories with grizzled old hacks by the pool of some hotel in Singapore or Guam – but here she was, crammed into a tiny rented room, sitting on a rented office chair with the foam leaking out the side. Not much of a bureau to close down , she thought grimly, looking around at her colleagues. The Washington Tribune London office consisted of Chuck, an eager but mousy Yale graduate; Karl, a forty-ish veteran of British local newspapers; and English rose Rebecca, who acted as Jim’s PA and occasionally filed a story on travel or fashion. And then there was Jim Keane himself. If you met Jim at a party, you’d guess he was a banker or a corporate lawyer. In his neat suits and club tie, he had all the polish – and sense of entitlement – of the preppy Ivy League classes. He was a fixture on the Hampstead intelligentsia circuit, and had written a rather pompous and self-regarding book called Sarajevo: City Under Siege , despite having been stationed in Bosnia for all of a week, just as the war was dragging to an end. Ruth had taken a great deal of pleasure seeing it in the window of one of Soho’s remainder bookstores a few months later, but Jim still seemed to believe he was Hemingway reborn.
    ‘All right, people, before we start, let me say I know all the excuses,’ said Jim. ‘You’re going to say that it’s summer and that nothing ever happens in summer. You’re going to complain that there’re no stories out there, or that there’s nothing to grab them Stateside. But’ – he tapped his signet ring on the desk – ‘we need to work, guys. You’ll all know that Isaac Grey has been over to London, and I want to show him just what we can do.’ He looked around the room. ‘So what have you got?’
    As Ruth had guessed, it was pretty slim pickings. The announcement of a new Cy Twombly show at the Tate Modern, a rumoured meeting between the Secretary of State and the Foreign Secretary about the situation in Iran, some royal tittle-tattle. If this was all they had, then perhaps Isaac was right to consider closing the London bureau.
    ‘Ruth?’
    She looked down at her notes and pulled a face. She had wanted to keep this new story under wraps until she had researched it some more, nailed down something more concrete, but they clearly needed something right now. She