Took a call today from Walter Ridgely, the foreign correspondent. I don’t know how he got my private number. But if half of what he’s written in his books about covering wars around the world is true and not made up out of whole cloth, he seems to have a knack for talking his way into places where he’s not supposed to go and learning things he wasn’t supposed to find out.
Anyway, he says he wants to write a book about Coerdian as his next big project. We get requests like this every now and then from members of the Fourth Estate, and it never seems like a good idea to give them the kind of access they ask for. Usually, though, it’s clear that the supplicant is some young buck hoping to make his bones with a big scoop on us, so they’re pre-disposed to look for any hint of scandal — and make something up if they can’t find anything. With this fellow, though, I’m not sure what he hopes to gain by riding us rather than, say, running off to cover another blood-spattered guerilla war (and God knows there are always enough of them around). I told him I’d think about it. And I’ll have Dyson and his people use the time to learn everything we possibly can about Ridgely and what his game might be….
