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more trusting sources, developed over years of manipulator-manipulatee symbiosis. But editors, younger and more remotely British every year, were slower to return his calls.
    Fein laid what he considered his personal curse on all of them—they should get beaten to a big story by a talk-show host with deep pockets. He reserved a special spot in his Media Hell for the tight-assed bookers of the television news-feature shows whose airy decisions about panelists and guests made all the difference in getting lucrative lecture dates. These well-bred young nepots—Irving was certain they were all related to big shots somewhere—kept telling him he had a “hot-personality” problem. Why was that? he asked himself, because the answer pleased him: the reason Fein came across as permanently angry was that he knew so much about what he knew, he found it hard to edit himself down to a zingy sound bite. That was why the roundtable shows shunned him. “When you go on,” one of the TV types had instructed him, “you mustn’t go on and on.”
    The media world was a year-round garden party, which was fine for the vendors of strawberries and cream but was hell for someone known to be the perennial skunk at the garden party. Whatever Fein wrote made the media-certified good guys look bad, which caused all sorts of media self-flagellation and earned him dirty looks from the clean and wholesome. Why was this? he asked himself in a long-running internal dialogue. He was ready with the answer: His stories were replete with villains and hypocrites, hollow hotshots and moral cowards, but never any heroes. Readers liked heroes, or at least villains with redeeming features, but this reporter made his targets look bad clear through.
    Irving Fein, resolutely independent operative, a free man with his own lance, could poke his head into any newsroom in town or bureau in Washington and get a wary welcome, but it had been a long time since he had had a major score, and everyone knew it.
    Now he had a lead on a big one. Like an oenologist sniffing an uncharted vintage before the first cases of wine got off the boat, Fein felt the thrill of knowing he was the first to tell that this one would develop mightily in time.
    The week before, he had received a blind tip on his answeringmachine about “the Feliks people” in Russia searching for a sleeper spy operating in America. He had tried this slim lead on a counterterrorism source at the CIA: Walter Clauson, last of the crowd brought in more than a generation before by the Agency’s legendary molehunter, James Jesus Angleton. Clauson had survived the Halloween Massacre of CIA hard-liners in the Carter years as well as the more recent post-Ames purge.
    “Mr. Clauson, this is Irving Fein. You’ve probably been reading my series on the Agency.”
    “I don’t like to get calls at home this early, Mr. Fein. Perhaps you can call me later at Langley.”
    Irving knew he had to get it all out in one breath. “I’m told you’re the one who tried to talk the FBI out of investigating the U.S. banker in Nairobi who was fronting for Iran in the Libyan tanker deal.”
    Clauson had slammed down the phone. Irving counted to twenty-six, his lucky number, and redialed; at the opening expostulation, he said, “Don’t hang up, I have something you want to know.” That usually stopped the intelligence types. “First I want you to know I respect you. It takes a lot of guts to hang up on Irving Fein, knowing what I can do to your career at the Company, and my hat is off to you.”
    He let the guy apologize at that point for having been testy at being awakened with an accusation of malfeasance. “Next let me tell you something you may or may not know: not everybody in the little house on F Street wishes you well.” The F Street property was a few steps from the Old Executive Office Building, near the White House, where Bill Casey, as Director of Central Intelligence, had liked to hole up in the Reagan era. Fein