I liked to walk to work. The combination of my handicapped placard and D.C. journalist plates would have allowed me to park Van on the White House lawn if I wanted to, but unless the weather was awful, I put it in a garage that formed the third point of a triangle with the gym and the office. That morning ramble, with Cher playing soft music through Chair’s speakers, gave me time to sort out my thoughts, plan the day, and make sure I kept in touch with the street.
In the desert, it had been essential to maintain contact with the so-called Arab streets. We gathered considerable intelligence from watching and listening and noticing even the small changes. Who had disappeared from a stall? Why was the price of figs going down? Where did a fruit peddler find the money to fix his truck? It was a learned habit that I’d carried with me through the years.
I tried to take a slightly different route every day to sample as many streets as possible. I’d gotten to know the area well. I knew the shops and their keepers; I had befriended the homeless and knew what spots they’d staked out—once even mediating a turf dispute over rights to a warm Metro grating. When I was on schedule, I got to know people on a similar schedule, and over time I had developed a sense of the Washington street. It got to a point where I could identify what street I was on by the scents from the stands and shops. Even sometimes by the cracks and divots in the sidewalks that rattled Mighty Chair.
In the days following the attacks, the streets turned cold. It was like an old friend avoiding me. People averted their eyes, mumbled a few words, and shook their head in response to a familiar greeting or simply turned their back to me to avoid contact. There was nothing to say. The audacity of the attacks, their success, the relentlessly mounting toll of dead and wounded, the endless photographs of known victims and those who were still missing, the reports of funerals, the stories of miraculous survivors and those who missed their fate by a seemingly innocuous decision—all of this shattered the last fragile hope that Wrightman could somehow bring America together. The dark, quiet anxiety that had been hanging over the country finally settled down as completely as if someone had simply put the lid on a Crock-Pot.
The depression was psychological. It spread as easily as dandelion seeds floating on a breeze. It seeped into every aspect of American society until it finally impacted the economy.
The worldwide economic collapse didn’t start here. It resulted from the confluence of several factors that had been percolating for years and exploded with the pandemic, which finally caused our markets first to freeze, then to begin the long decline. The damage throughout Europe began with Brexit, followed by the anarchy in Venezuela that eventually bled into other South American nations, the unchecked Russian aggression, the relentless Chinese economic expansion, the political unrest throughout the third world, and the growing belligerence of Iran against the OPEC nations and North Korea against South Korea and this country. All of this was made significantly worse by the mass migration of desperate populations caused by war and climate change. The coronavirus finally collapsed the already weakened global economy. The vaccine might have stabilized the situation had the drought not led to famine, which devastated the remnants of the third-world economies. The result was global insecurity, which morphed into global instability.
But what actually caused the collapse was fear—the fear that finally reached the street. As long as we all held hands, sang “Kumbaya” by the campfire, and ignored reality, somehow we kept chugging along. I’ll tell you the event that I believe made a significant difference. In late August 2022, just as the economy was stabilizing, Amazon received an order for a Kenmore microwave from Mr. and Mrs. Rob and Jeni Farwell of Mesa, Arizona. It was one of about 13 million microwaves that were sold in America that year. Rob Farwell had placed the order online. It was forwarded by Amazon’s internal computer system to the computers operating their warehouse. A robot in the Phoenix fulfillment center was directed to pick the item off the shelf and place it on a truck. The self-driving truck delivered it to a warehouse in Mesa. From there, the self-operating mini-system delivered it to the Farwells’ address, depositing it in the Nest delivery security system. An alert was sent to both Rob’s and Jeni’s cell phones, informing them that their new microwave was waiting on their front porch. The Nest locked it in its secure box until one of the Farwells got home and opened the box with their password. It was a dazzling display of technology. Not a single human being touched that carton from the moment the order was placed to its delivery a day later. Amazon was justifiably proud of this display of excellence and boasted about it on a Super Bowl commercial.
But the estimated 110 million people who saw that commercial had a very different reaction: Not a single human being touched that carton from the moment the order was placed to its delivery a day later. They were horrified. They saw their jobs disappearing. Rather than marveling at this feat, they wondered how anyone was going to be able to pay for the microwave. Any hopes that the jobs that had been destroyed by Covid-19 would be coming back disappeared that day.
Here, here’s an example: During my military career every time I boarded one of our Globemasters, I’d wonder how the fuck anything that big could get off the ground. It made no sense. How could thin air support a hundred tons of steel? But somehow it did. I decided what made it possible was the collective belief of all the people onboard; as long as we believed it could fly, it could fly. I worried that if any one of us dared admit the truth, that airplane would not get off the ground. What kept us all sitting there quietly was that cool guy in a crisp uniform wearing aviator shades—aviator shades, they even named them after him—and smiling confidently as he stepped into the cockpit. Our captain. All the Sullys in the world, even before there was a Sully, we trusted that he knew what he was doing. He said it could get off the ground, it could get off the ground. We had a leader who would take care of us so we could sit back with confidence and watch a boring in-flight movie about marching penguins.
As far as I was concerned, for several years that same sort of belief system was the only thing holding together the American economy. It really should have collapsed decades earlier. It made no real sense: it was too big; it had too many structural problems; it was inefficient and unfair. It was capricious and disorderly and depended as much on luck as on ingenuity and innovation. The distribution of wealth created the very rich and all the rest of us. The only reason the economy worked was because people believed it would continue working. That somehow, whatever the problem, the smart guys would figure it out. Even the pandemic hadn’t destroyed that pioneer optimism. Whatever problems existed, somehow our Sully would come along and solve them—just as had happened throughout our history.
That Amazon commercial terrified everyone.
To the surprise of most experts, the American economy wheezed and sputtered through the disasters but did not totally collapse. It proved to be too big, with too many moving parts. But it slowed, and the more it slowed, the more concerned people became, which caused it to slow even more. As I wrote in one of my most widely reposted columns:
We’ve lost our Hojo. We are about as far as we can be from the promise of post–World War II America, when our factories were bursting with economic potential and our politicians were determined to export our unique democracy to the world, when you could find the security of an orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s on every spanking new highway crisscrossing the nation, knowing that a coffee-pot-carrying waitress named Esther would be pleased as punch to serve you apple pie a la mode topped with any one of its 28 flavors of ice cream. We’ve lost that American can-do spirit in which we once so confidently believed, and it has been replaced by … an array of overly-confident cats on Facebook.
It was the perfect climate from which a candidate like Ian Wrightman could emerge. He understood, or someone in his campaign understood, what Americans so desperately wanted: someone to believe in. A Sully to convey the message: Trust me, everything is going to be all right. The only thing Wrightman was missing were the aviator glasses. So while the Republicans were warning Americans about encroaching socialism and the Democrats were promising economic equality and affordable healthcare, Wrightman positioned himself as the plumber who could fix the leaking pipe. He shrugged his shoulders and agreed that all those promises the other guys were making were great, we all want everything they were offering, but meanwhile that leak is destroying your house. It really was a brilliant metaphor; millions of Americans easily related to fear of plumbing.
The usual Meet the Press/This Week/GPS panelists characterized his campaign slogan, “Restore Order,” as a code phrase for either fascism or neoliberalism. But what they failed to understand—okay, I missed it too—is that order was exactly what people wanted. Wrightman paid attention to what was happening around the world. The Russian people loved Putin. The Brazilians elected Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain—note that, a captain!—who proclaimed, “A good criminal is a dead criminal,” and set out to prove it. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte became wildly popular by detaining small-time criminals for loitering and smoking and even drinking outdoors while sanctioning executions for more serious crimes like dealing drugs.
Wrightman came into office with a smile and a fist. The smile provided cover for the fist. Day after day his administration announced seemingly minor changes and restrictions that taken as a whole gave the impression that he was going to do exactly as he promised: restore order. After the endless chaos of the Trump White House and the intense ineffectiveness of the Democrats, the belief that an intelligent adult was flying the plane allowed people to sit back and enjoy the penguin movie. It worked—as long as nobody looked behind the curtain.
With great fanfare, Homeland Security introduced the new Cyber Card program, creating an app that allowed everyone to download their national driver’s license—which also could be used to bypass long security lines at airports and to prove voting eligibility—on their smartphone; but registering for it required providing proof of citizenship and other personal documentation. In reality, it was the country’s first national identity card, and it allowed any law enforcement officer to instantly learn numerous private details about you simply by scanning the bar code. The whole concept made me feel uncomfortable—in fact a lot of the questions that had to be answered were invasive—but as much as I didn’t want to register, the card offered a lot of convenience that was impossible to ignore.
I started to get really uneasy when the Defense Department, citing the founding fathers’ belief, as directly expressed in the Second Amendment, that a national militia “was necessary to the security” of the nation, urged gun owners to voluntarily form militias to assist local law enforcement. This was taking the actions of the Trump administration in sending armed DHS troopers into our cities a great step further; it proposed granting limited law enforcement powers to private organizations. To facilitate this, grants were given to cover start-up costs and buy locally designed uniforms; blanket liability insurance policies were made available. Within days, militias began forming all over the country—“Elks with guns,” joked Fox News anchor Trevor Roberts. To ensure these militias remained independent of the military and were not directed by the government, the NRA was placed in charge of the program.
To better fight global terrorism, the Treasury Department joined the new International Bank Database, which allowed the government access to all domestic bank records, as well as any overseas transactions greater than $5,000.
The hits kept coming. Almost every day the new administration announced a new initiative. Jenny began referring to it as “the daily disaster.” Health and Human Services began providing five-minute-long “Morning Announcements” to every American school. This was a national version of the opening announcements most schools broadcast over their PA systems, reminding them about everything from club and athletic schedules to upcoming vacations. “Morning Announcements” was strictly voluntary. At eight A.M. each morning students could join their peers from around the country online to hear a celebrity provide information the government believed it was important they know. In addition to showing the Clip of the Day, generally something heartwarming or guaranteed to make students laugh, it reminded them about upcoming events, urged them to stay away from drugs, provided a three-sentence history lesson, and only occasionally slipped in some political content.
Few of these actions attracted significant complaints. They were rolled out over a period of time, often without an official announcement “for security reasons.” And if there were protests or legal challenges, they were dealt with quickly—and always legally. When the ACLU attempted to enjoin the government from activating its National Surveillance Camera Center, which connected all public surveillance cameras (and interior cameras from any entity that volunteered to join, which eventually included major retailers, most stadiums and arenas, even homeowners), the FISA courts ruled secretly that this system was an invaluable and entirely legal resource for law enforcement.
While there was some minor grumbling, the most controversial action taken by the Wrightman administration was granting presidential immunity from prosecution to Donald Trump, ending years of legal wrangling. Legally the power of the president extended only to federal cases, but several states had indicted Trump, his oldest son, Trump Junior, and his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, for crimes that included tax evasion, money laundering, bank fraud, misappropriation of funds, and perjury. In total, the disgraced former president was facing more than seventy-five criminal charges that together would have put him behind bars for several hundred years. Channeling Gerald Ford, who had pardoned Richard Nixon upon ascending to the presidency, Wrightman said that while prosecuting Trump might make many people feel good, it would do nothing but distract us from the serious problems the nation was facing. Attorney General Richard Langsam issued the first presidential immunity. It was of dubious legal value, but Wrightman made an impassioned speech to explain his decision. While the cable stations that would have carried the trials were unhappy about it, complaining about lost commercial revenue, most people agreed it was the right decision. Trump paid significant fines and was allowed to retreat to Palm Beach, where he remained a recluse at Mar-a-Lago.
Every one of these new programs was supported and reinforced on all the popular social media platforms. Reign Man Munchmeyer supposedly employed as many as five hundred young men and women, working out of a converted airplane hangar at CIA headquarters at Langley, to apply and improve upon the lessons we had learned from Russian hackers in the 2016 elections. The existence of a social propaganda unit obviously was a major story, so I tried to track it down. I cultivated a couple of promising sources, but I was never able to get anyone to go on record, which meant my story would get the dreaded O rather than a desirable F or N. I was told, for example, that the kids in Hanger P had successfully defused a scheduled National Day of Rage by promoting fictitious marches that were to take place on different days in numerous places. But I couldn’t nail it down. I didn’t stop trying. As far as I know, it’s still sitting in that pile of “working stories” on my desk. Wherever that desk is today.
You know what surprised me most about all of this? Besides those usual nattering nabobs of negativism (that’s you, Howie, if you’re reading this), few people seemed to care very much. Unfortunately, that included me. I didn’t object. I complained, I gradually got better at adding cups to my tower, but I didn’t do a damn thing. I was just another fly on the cheese of life. Other than the rating system, little that Wrightman did seemed to intrude on my everyday life. I went to work every day, I wrote my stories and worked on my next book, I fell in love, and lo and behold, I actually felt a little better about the country.
Writing that line right now—“I actually felt a little better about the country”—gave me pause. But at the time, the situation seemed to have stabilized. And that was enough. Maybe my professional self didn’t like it, but that old military me accepted the command structure working around me. And like so many other people, secretly I even liked it.
I certainly talked about it enough. Understanding, interpreting, then explaining politics basically defined my job. My mother told me I talked about politics too much, reminding me that I always was a complainer (although she still loved me!) and suggesting I take more of an interest in sports and theater. Or cooking! Why don’t you write about cooking? she asked, pointing out the popularity of the Food Network.
Most mornings I discussed it with my boys and girl of the Light Brigade. This was the close-knit group of people with whom I worked out before going to work. There were fourteen regulars in the bunch who worked in a variety of industries and professions, ranging from sugar industry lobbyist Charlie Fitzgerald to my workout partner, Hack Wilson, a computer guru who hinted he had some vague connection to some unnamed government agency (cough, NSA, cough). As a result, at least one of us could offer insight about whatever was going on in the news. Jenny and I talked politics all the time. And in every conversation, whomever I spoke with, no matter what had happened, whatever regulation Wrightman proposed, we always came to the same conclusion: It’s a lot better than Trump being president.
I’m sure you remember that for several months after the 2020 election, any version of that phrase became our national punch line. No matter what went wrong, “It’s still a lot better than Trump being president!” You got fired and your house burned down? It’s still a lot better than Trump being president. Your spouse cleaned out your life savings and ran away with their life coach? Well, it’s still a lot better than Trump being president. A building falls on you in Fallujah and you’ll never walk again. It’s a lot better than Trump being president. Okay, maybe not a lot better.
But at this point there remained one nagging question about Wrightman: What was his agenda? Exactly how far was he willing to go to “Restore Order”? That phrase had always made me nervous; coincidently it had been our announced mission during one of my tours in the sandbox. And what did he mean by that, anyway? Jeff Greenfield, the Pro’s sports editor, once referred to him as “our first fill-in-the-blank” president, pointing out how little we knew about him. Everyone seemed to have a slightly different but acceptable interpretation of his objectives. Whatever it was, we accepted, it still was better than Trump being president.
The visible changes seemed minor and rarely interfered with daily life. Most of the significant changes were structural and were taking place behind the scenes. In my daily walk, everything sort of looked the same—even with the growing number of empty storefronts. Occasionally I’d see a member of one of the new militia groups proudly wearing his or her uniform top or unit pin on the street. At times my laptop would freeze or the cursor would move by itself or it would take an unusually long time to load, causing me to wonder if someone was hacking into my work or if it simply was my ingrained distrust of government manifesting itself as paranoia.
The audacity of these three simultaneous attacks changed everything. Regular Army troops in full gear were stationed on almost every corner. I had yet to get comfortable with the sight of heavily armed soldiers guarding our airports, and that had been going on for decades; so seeing troops patrolling the streets of Washington was far more chilling. They had been ordered to protect government buildings, airports and railroad terminals, power stations, and other potential targets. It was as if the city had been transformed overnight into a clichéd scene from an underbudget cold war movie. It didn’t feel real. Once I had been one of those soldiers, but far away, in a different city, in a different country.
But there was something else tickling my imagination. It suddenly hit me as I paused to watch a bored soldier standing rigidly at the front door of a Chase bank. There was no logical reason for those soldiers to be there. The attacks were over. They had taken place a few days earlier, and it was unlikely there would be more attacks. So why had soldiers been ordered to blanket the city? The obvious reason was to provide us all with some sense of security, but the result was precisely the opposite. Their presence simply amped up the terror.
Just as we had during the pandemic, all around the country people dug in, stocking up on staples like cheese, water, pet food, toilet paper, and ice cream. Long lines formed at gas stations and ATMs as people filled their tanks and extra cans and put cash in their pocket. When the stock market opened, it immediately crashed and within a half hour, circuit breakers halted trading; maybe not surprisingly among the few stocks that did not drop precipitously were Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, Match.com and Tinder (which rose quickly), and every defense contractor as the country prepared to hunker down.
Wild rumors spread like Covid-19. Stay off the bridges and out of the tunnels; the food supply had been poisoned; two suitcase nukes had been smuggled into the country and would be detonated when the first arrest was made.
Within days, politicians and celebrities were tweeting furiously, reaffirming their patriotism and offering their personal hopes and prayers to everyone affected by the attacks. The Obama family issued a statement expressing their deepest sympathy, reminding Americans that “throughout our history we have always been strongest when we have united to defend our national interests and American values.” Senator Lindsey Graham told Jake Tapper in a shaky voice, “It seems to me that right now the right place for all of us to be is somewhere between complacent and panicked.” Jay-Z, the Clooneys, and Julia Roberts announced they would be hosting a telethon to raise funds for the victims, and in an unusual tweet, the Kardashian/Jenner family press liaison reported they would be donating all appearance fees to survivor funds.
While the networks eliminated all regular programming and commercials to focus on the search and recovery operations, as well as the continuing investigation, Freedom Caucus leader Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told Fox News, “While we’re burying our dead is not the time to blame the Wrightman administration for this tragedy, but if it wasn’t, if it wasn’t, I don’t have any doubt that the environment that fostered these attacks was created by socialist Democrats, led by Barack Obama.”
While most Americans settled in, I was running at super-speed. And I am embarrassed to admit, loving it. When I had come rolling out of the hospital, I’d gone into a pretty deep depression. I thought the best time of my life was done, hasta la vegans, that nothing I was capable of doing could ever approach that feeling of operating in the field, knowing that the enemy was nearby, maybe even watching me, and being so acutely aware of everything around me I could feel a tremble in the air. It was that loss of intensity, of being fully engaged and ready to burst that I missed so desperately.
To my surprise, I’d found an unexpected level of excitement behind my desk, when I caught the scent of a story and began pursuing the hidden truths. That scent was in the air; within hours, a day at most, a journalist was going to identify the terrorists. This was the story of my generation. “Cher,” I told her, “turn off the music,” and went to work.
Our practice at the Pro was to update our home page hourly. Like everybody else in the office I was equal parts exhausted and exhilarated, running on adrenaline and coffee. My phones, both registered and burners, rang incessantly. My email and text message accounts were overflowing. Twitter and Instagram badgered me for my attention. And I read the stories that came across my desk. There were some pretty compelling first sentences:
Honolulu (AP) July … Navy divers continued the gruesome task of recovering bodies trapped beneath the mangled wreckage of the USS Arizona and massive slabs of concrete ripped from the memorial platform …
New York (AP) July … Port Authority engineers estimated it may take as long as five months before the Lincoln Tunnel can resume normal operations, as crews continued to find victims of the Tunnel Massacre in their burned-out vehicles …
Outside Morgan City, Louisiana (AP) July … Rescue teams believe they have located and rescued a significant number of remaining survivors of the massive flooding that occurred when terrorists gained remote control of the …
And, no kidding:
Washington, D.C. (Special to the Post) July … Sources deep within the intelligence agencies refused to confirm reports that evidence has been developed conclusively linking …
I read everything, I watched the news reports, but the big question, the only one that really mattered, remained unanswered: Who dun it? Who launched these attacks?
The White House issued statements every few hours in an effort to show they were top of this, but the line they were pitching didn’t square with what I was hearing. Supposedly the smarty-pants at the alphabet agencies were making progress and it was only a matter of hours before they identified the terrorist group responsible. The military had been put on full alert; the Fifth Fleet was steaming toward the Persian Gulf, all leaves worldwide had been canceled, and troops in the United States had been ordered to prepare for immediate deployment.
It was an impressive show of force. We were all armed up with nowhere to go.
Okay, I admit it, I am a big fan of Jack Reacher, Easy Rawlins, Dave Robicheaux, Spenser, all the crime-solving tough guys, but as Howie had taught me, real-life investigations rarely involve punching out bad guys or figuring out the meaning of some obscure clue that had evaded even the most astute readers. Good information almost always comes from a reliable source or deep digging into piles of boring paperwork. I Zoomed, Skyped, Duo’ed, and FaceTimed with reporters and continually checked in with my sources. I put Mighty Chair to work too, giving Cher key names, words, and phrases and telling her to scour the internet for them. She reported regularly, “I have not found those words yet, boss.”
“Thank you, Cher,” I replied, still amused that I couldn’t help thanking her.
I activated my Rollie Network, reaching way back to my days in the field. This was the real worldwide net, consisting of many good people with whom I had grown up in the world of guns, guts, and secrets. People I had met on my path whom I knew I could trust. It included men and women I had worked with and fought side by side with in my first life, as well as those I had met and cultivated in my second life—mercs and spooks who were still living on the dark side, chasing bad guys and developing good intel, as well as people who had moved into management positions, often in international or corporate security. They were spread out across the world, my PEWS, my personal early warning system.
I dug deep and came up with a jumble of nothing. Everybody had heard something, but none of it made sense to me. Too many wires were crossing and leading nowhere. A lot of might-be’s and could-be’s, a few look-at-those-guys. It was a new offshoot of ISIS. It was a resurgent Taliban. It was Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram; it was Al-Shabab; it was the homegrown White Legion of Honor; it was a team of mercs employed by North Korea or Russia. It was Colonel Mustard in the parlor with the candlestick. I didn’t buy any of it. The most sophisticated watchers in history were using the most sophisticated technology to keep track of these people. If they pooped in Pakistan, we would hear it in Langley.
A guy who didn’t exist working at a place with no name that wasn’t there, a battle buddy I had pulled out of a burning Humvee in my last life, hinted that an alliance had been formed between two or more terrorist organizations. He had no names—“an all-star team of bad guys,” he called them. Maybe, but doubtful; if that had been true, somebody somewhere sometime would have overheard a whisper or droned in on two people together who shouldn’t have been together. More than that, though, the competition between these groups for funding, for recruits, for power, for recognition was so extreme it was impossible for me to believe they could work together to plan, coordinate, and carry out attacks of this magnitude. I’d spent almost three years moving in and out of Afghanistan. At times I went to places that don’t show up on any maps, meeting with shadows, enlisting cooperation, making payoffs, carrying messages. Some tribal feuds go back generations. These were men who would pull knives arguing over what to have for dinner. No way I believed they could get along well enough for long enough to pull off something like this. And then keep quiet about this success? No, no way. But. But if it was true … if they had figured out how to cooperate, now that was a scary thought.