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of the world’s most dangerous weapons.
    Of course, I hadn’t raised any of this in my e-mails to my source in Syria. I’d simply repeated my long-standing requests for an interview. But I was increasingly certain this was why Ramzy wanted to talk now, when he had never talked publicly before. He wanted the world to know what he had. He wanted the American people and their president to know. What’s more, I had to believe he savored the irony of Ayman al-Zawahiri hearing through an American newspaper that one of his former advisors had hit the mother lode   —that an al Qaeda offshoot finally had possession of the very weapons al Qaeda itself had been desperately seeking for nearly two decades.
    I hoped I was right. Not that Ramzy had the WMD, mind you, but that he had a story   —an important story   —he wanted to communicate through me. It was, I suspected, my only hope of survival. After all, this was a man who cut people’s throats for sport, Americans’ most of all. Only if he really did want to use me to communicate a big story would my colleagues and I be safe.
    It was no wonder no one I knew wanted me to head into Syria to track this man down and speak with him face to face. Even the colleagues I was about to meet were deeply uncomfortable. I certainly understood why. And I didn’t blame them. What we were about to do wasn’t normal. But I   —and they   —were part of “the tribe,” part of an elite group, a small cadre of foreign correspondents whose lives were devoted to covering wars and rumors of war, revolutions, chaos,and bloodshed of all kinds. It’s what I’d gone to school for, nearly twenty years earlier. It’s what I’d been doing for the New York Daily News and the Associated Press and the Times ever since. I loved it. I lived for it.
    Some said it was an addiction. They said people like me were adrenaline junkies. Maybe I was. But that’s not the way I thought of it. To me, risk was part of my job, and it was a job my colleagues told me I wasn’t half-bad at. I had won an award for covering a Delta Force firefight in Kandahar, Afghanistan, with another Times reporter in 2001. And I had even won a Pulitzer for a series of articles I wrote in 2003 when I was embedded with the First Brigade of the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division as they stormed Baghdad. The awards were gratifying. But I didn’t do this to win awards. I did it because I loved it. I did it because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
    Most reporters couldn’t wait to get out of Afghanistan or Iraq after the initial invasions and the establishment of the new governments. But I repeatedly requested longer tours. I loved getting to know our boys who suited up for battle every day. I loved interviewing the Iraqis our troops were training and taking into battle. I also loved having beers and trading gossip with the spooks from Langley and MI6 and every other intelligence agency on the planet who had come to play in the Big Game. Most of all, though, I found it absolutely fascinating to slip away from the Green Zone and get out in the hinterland and risk life and limb trying to hook up with one insurgent commander or another to get his story. All the news that’s fit to print, right? I wasn’t there to regurgitate whatever the flacks at State or the Pentagon tried to spoon-feed me. I was there to find the real stories.
    So whatever lay ahead, I was absolutely determined to head into Syria. I was going after the story. Not a single person I had confided in approved of what I was doing. But I wanted to think that one would have. I wanted to believe my grandfather would have beenproud of me. At least he would have understood what I was doing and why.
    A. B. Collins covered the Second World War for United Press International. Then he worked for the Associated Press all over the globe. To be perfectly honest, he was my idol. Maybe it was because of all the stories he used to tell me when I was growing up. That