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the first serial rights on this story will be a newsmagazine cover.” When the agent looked skeptical, the reporter felt pressured into tipping a little more of his hand. “What we’ve got here is some kind of financial mastermind operating underground in America, with megabucks from the old KGB, out of the reach of the law. He’s maybe got access to all the intelligence resources of the KGB to give him insider stuff all around the world.” Now Irving was guessing. “And he’s been building up a pile of dough big enough to cause a financial panic, destabilize the government in Moscow, and help the mafiya and the old commies take over and start grabbing back the old empire.”
    Now Ace looked suitably alarmed. Irving thought he could put it across with a happy-ending possibility: “Or—if the stash gets big enough and is used right—he could use those assets to help the Russian people make it under capitalism. A whole lot of the future of the world hangs on finding this guy, and making sure he delivers his bundle to the right people.”
    “Or giving it back to the investors he stole it from,” Ace amended.
    “Nah, this is bigger than cops and robbers. Ace, for crissake, open your eyes.” Irving, flying on hunch alone at this point, took the agent to the mountaintop. “This is a story about, first, the corruption of the world financial markets to build up a fortune; and second, about the struggle between the good and evil elements in Russia to find and use those assets. By digging out the first story, of how the sleeper does it, I can have an impact on how the second story comes out. If I can get the news, then I can make the news. Don’t you see?” Until that moment, Fein himself had not quite seen it that way; talking it through had helped. Had he sold Ace?
    “I recall the story of Moses leading his people out of Egypt,” said the agent, “and telling his scribe of his plan to miraculously part the Red Sea.”
    Irving beat him to the punchline: “ ‘If you can bring that off, Moses, I can get you four pages in the Old Testament.’ You’ll see, Ace. There’s a huge story here, and I can dig it out if you can get me a good advance without tipping it.”
    He rushed out past the smoked mirrors to the elevator, irritation with Ace mingling with a perfumed sense of a woman’s recent presence and the tingling in his fingertips he got when he was on to something.
    He touched the arrow that summoned the down elevator; it did not light up. He hated that sort of thing, because it made him feel impotent. He jabbed at it again, as Viveca Farr had done earlier, and wondered if the unlit button stirred her hidden anxieties as well. Third time, the light came on; the damn machine in Ace’s fancy office building needed fixing.

NEW YORK
    Six minutes to air. She took her position at the anchor desk this early to get over the willies that had afflicted her since she began on-air work five years before. She was certain that red-light fright would never leave her even when she sharp-elbowed her way onto the anchor desk of the evening news.
    The newsbreak, one word, was perfect for Viveca Farr: sky-highlights short enough to make an impression and not so long as to get boring about any subject. The prime of prime time, between entertainment shows at 9:00 P.M . EST, reaching thirty million viewers, did not arouse envy among the network news anchorpeople because it ruined dinner right though the week; besides, the slot was usually filled by a newcomer not seeming to be competition for them. But as Viveca saw it, the newsbreak was her own show; the camera never left her face, even with film running over her shoulder on the screen. She was the forty-five-second star.
    She shot a glance at her head on the monitor. The highlights on her blond hair attested to the teamwork of hairdresser and lighting man: not brassy, not like the surface of a glazed doughnut, but not too softly feminine either; rather, a sensible hairdo for a