His action was more a reflex than a plan.  In his years as a snooper, first as a reporter, then as a lippmann, he had learned that close-held secrets could often be cracked by going all the way to the top and there making himself unbearably unpleasant.  He knew that such twisting of the tiger's tail was dangerous, for he understood the psychopathology of great power as thoroughly as Jill Boardman lacked knowledge of it - but he had habitually relied on his relative safety as a dealer in still another sort of power almost universally feared and appeased by the powerful.