Free Jan's Story by Barry Petersen Page B

were down to one. Me.
    I knew it would be more challenging, and I talked with Jan before we decided on the move. We both felt this was an opportunity for me to cover stories that were done by other correspondents last time around. It could also mean more time away from home.
    For her, it was a fair tradeoff. Maybe I'd be on a few more airplanes, but those airplanes were not taking me to Sarajevo or Baghdad. Jan would happily exchange a few more nights alone with me on the road someplace in Asia for those nights of fear knowing I was someplace where I could get hurt … or worse.
    In 2002 the job took on a new demand. Until then I was based primarily in Tokyo, but the Chinese insisted that we pay more attention to China or lose our journalist accreditation. So CBS rented a serviced one-bedroom furnished apartment in Beijing, and Jan and I started a two-city life. I would be in Beijing anywhere from a week to months at a time, depending on stories that needed doing, and usually with little or no warning about when we needed to change cities.
    And like any foreign correspondent, when I went to work in Tokyo or Beijing in the morning, I had no way of knowing in what city or country I would be sleeping that night. An earthquake, a plane crash, a story that caught some executive producer's eye drove my professional life. I carried a passport with me everywhere because sometimes the call would come and there was barely enough time to get to the airport. I was expected and paid for making it onto that flight and to that story.
    The time away from Jan could be a few days. But when I was sent to Pakistan in late 2001 and ended up covering the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, the assignment stretched into two months. Pearl was executed by his kidnappers in Karachi, Pakistan, on February 1, 2002.
    I wanted to make it up to her, to thank her for being home by herself and living on phone calls from me and not on the touch and holding that we both craved from each other. And I needed to somehow reassure her that I was okay, even after covering the story of another journalist who was, in the end, murdered. We needed time alone to celebrate being alive.
    I called our travel agent and booked her on a plane to Paris where I met her. We walked and shopped and ate at wonderful restaurants, as we had the first time we went during the first months of our marriage. This was before the formal diagnosis, before everything was colored by The Disease, and that is why it is such a good and fond memory for me.
    But even being home offered no real respite from the growing demands of work. The pressure to get on the air never ended, especially in Tokyo. A high level of story production was the only way we could justify the expense of a bureau in one of the world's most expensive cities. I felt that the jobs of the others in the office—the field producer, the Japanese staff, the cameraman, the editor—rested, in large part, in my hands. If the producer and I came up with stories that were getting on the air, we made everyone look good. If the story count slipped, questions from the home office would naturally follow; why was the company spending a lot and getting back only a little. More than ever, it was critical to keep ourselves looking good.
    It essentially meant my day never ended. If there was a good story on a Sunday, then we damn well wanted to get on the air, so we worked on Sunday. They call journalism the first draft of history. I would go, see events, talk to people, and then condense it into an Evening News report.
    One Sunday morning, about 1 a.m., I got called into the office to write a story concerning Asia, but when I got there I was unable to focus, unable to draw together the various facts needed for the script, or organize in my mind the video that was available for me to use in the story. This was my job, and I'd failed. I was on the phone with the executive producer, an old friend, and I started crying