8

I pecked.

I downloaded my laundry list: my running compilation of notes, story ideas, little things that bothered me, all those passing thoughts that I’d told Cher to remember. I was looking for anything that might relate to Detroit. McCord’s phone call had rung my cowbell. Detroit was old news. Both Snopes and PolitiFact had ruled the story Incomplete. The rumors were still floating in cyberspace, but every big story spawned rumors. Six decades later, millions of people still believed the moon landing had been faked, the government was going to invade Texas, Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, and Melania Trump had been known in L.A. as Melvin Knauss before her sex change operation. No one paid too much attention to any of them. To me, at least, it looked like the Detroit story was in the rearview mirror. Whatever truth there was to it, the administration had successfully fended it off. So what was McCord afraid of?

Near the bottom of my list I found the name Martin Shaw, Detroit PD. It took me a few seconds to remember who he was; Shaw was the police officer Wrightman had singled out in his speech. I thought it was a little odd that there had been no follow-up story. Usually when the president mentions someone, the media rushes to tell that person’s story. It’s like the Wheel of Fortune landing on your name. Especially in this context. But this time, nada. There hadn’t been any follow-up stories.

Putting my legendary investigative reporting skills to work, I googled the main number for the Detroit Police Department and told Cher to dial it. When Sergeant Someone answered, I asked in my best good-old-pal voice, “Hey, hi. Marty Shaw around?”

“Hold on,” the obviously distracted sergeant said.

A few rings later, in a voice that resonated command presence: “Lieutenant Shaw.”

“Lieutenant Shaw, this is Rollie Stone. I’m an editor at The Promethean. I just—”

“I know who you are,” he responded evenly. “I’ve seen you on TV. Look, I’m sorry, Mr. Stone, but I can’t talk to you. This is a legal matter and the lawyers—”

He was talking to me. I just had to keep him talking. “If you want,” I interrupted, “we can make this completely off the record. I’ve been writing a series…”

Shaw chuckled. “Oh, c’mon. Do you know a single cop who hasn’t been burned by that line? I’ve read a couple of your stories, I’d like—”

I mirrored his friendly tone. “Well, sometimes it works.” I was three-plus sentences in and he hadn’t hung up. A good sign. Rather than asking questions he wasn’t going to answer, I looked for common ground. A high percentage of law enforcement officers have military backgrounds. I took a shot. “Can you at least fill in a couple of blanks for me, Lieutenant? I think I read that you were army?”

“Marty,” he corrected; I knew I had him when he told me he had been in the desert. He had commanded an MP platoon attached to an Urban Affairs unit. Over there, that wasn’t just directing traffic or collecting Saturday-night drunks. The MPs provided security for the do-gooders, going into the villages and cities with them, sometimes while the fires were still burning. Marty Shaw had ridden the danger trail. I didn’t offer much about my experience, allowing him to drag it out of me. Special Ops, advance scouting, and mission targeting. In addition to providing boots-on-the-ground intelligence, painting targets for laser-guided weapons.

Shaw had been there after me but knew about our work. Having seen Mighty Chair on TV, he asked how it happened. This isn’t a story I tell often or easily, but this was guy to guy, soldier to soldier, journalist to source. “We had intel that several tribal chiefs were meeting to collect payment for planting IEDs.” As I told the story, I was there. I could see the glare of the day. “The going rate back then was $50 for each successfully planted device.”

“That didn’t change much when I was there.”

I took a deep breath and just kept going. “We ID’ed the building. My job was to drop sensors, then stand back. Problem was that about three minutes before bingo the chiefs left the building. Maybe they got a warning, who knows, but I watched them scramble. They got into their vehicles and out of Dodge. Thing was, soon as they were gone, a bunch of kids ran into the building to see if they’d left anything behind.”

Shaw didn’t say a word. Those kids were still running through my mind.

“I went in right behind them. I got them out just before the missiles hit, but I didn’t make it. The whole fucking building collapsed on top of me. The locals didn’t know I’d painted the target, they just saw me go in and get their kids. They dug me out by hand and kept me breathing until our people got there. That was it.”

“Sorry,” he said in a tone that carried his own experiences there. In a far more upbeat voice he wondered, “So how’d you get there?”

“There” being the Pro. “Friends in low places, I guess.” We both laughed. Subject changed. I gave him the pitch. In contrast to the denizens of Trumpworld, a place in which beliefs trumped truth, we took great pride in what we were doing. We believed journalism mattered. Rah, rah for the good guys.

Sha … Marty told me he’d heard of the Pro but hadn’t read it until a friend forwarded the article I’d written about the mother. “You did a nice job,” he said. His response told me a lot about what he wasn’t saying. After an uncomfortable pause he continued. “Listen, you understand I’m not allowed to talk to you about any of this. I doubt that’s going to change, but if it does, I promise I’ll get in contact with you.”

Some stories have to be developed slowly, like old-fashioned negatives coming to life in a darkroom, before you know exactly what they’re going to look like. When I hung up, I thought, That’s a good start. Whether it would lead anywhere or not, who knew? I gave him my contact information. No different from dozens of similar conversations. But now, sitting here, knowing what it led to, I do wonder sometimes that if I could go back to that night, would I have made that phone call?

I hope so.

Seconds after I’d hung up Cher told me in her lilting electronic voice that my sister was calling. It’s called timing, a ticka-ticka-ticka. Just when I’d finished exposing my emotions. “Cher, tell her I’ll call her back, please.” I liked my sister; I even loved her in a familial way, but we weren’t especially close. Before, when traveling was easier and the Army cooperated, I’d get home at least once a year to see my mother as well as my sister and her kids. She was six years older than me, so our lives just brushed at the edges while we were growing up. Bea was a settler, always was, living happily in a gated village with her accountant husband, a good guy, and their two girls. My nieces were repeating Bea’s life, but with more TVs.

We spoke around holidays or when there was a family problem or a decision had to be made or there was a payment due on our father’s headstone or when she saw me on air; often enough to know the broad strokes of each other’s lives.

Maybe I’m being a little bit of a downer. Our relationship was actually better than I portray it. I never doubted that she was always proud of her little bro. In fact, she’s already brought the girls up here to visit Uncle Big Mouth. But whatever it was she was calling about, it just wasn’t the right time. By the time I went back to work, I had already forgotten about my conversation with Marty Shaw.

Apparently I’d made much more of an impression on him than I had imagined. Three nights later, I got the biggest surprise of my career. It was almost nine o’clock. I was still at my desk, trying to piece together a story about those seemingly innocent places in the budget where Congress hides billions of dollars for intelligence operations. Specialized Educational Benefits, $2.3 billion? Transportation in Developing Nations, $1.4 billion?

I was just finishing a Google Duo talk with Jenny, who was reviewing proposed legislation for political traps, to figure out where we would meet for a late dinner, when I received an anonymous chat request. The caller’s sign-in name was NFA, the reporter’s catchall meaning “not for attribution.” No reporter in history has ever rejected a mysterious anonymous call. “Hold on a second,” I told Jenny. “Let me see who this is.”

A few seconds later a grainy video popped up on my monitor. It was black and white, very dark, and for several seconds I couldn’t figure out what it was. Whatever it was, it was framed, and I realized someone using a handheld device, a cell phone most likely, was recording a scene from a different source. That’s one way of protecting your identity. As my eyes focused, I saw a soldier in full gear standing about two feet away. That’s when I figured out this was night-vision footage from a body cam.

“Holy shit,” I whispered. Thank you, oh great father Thomas Alva Edison.

I remembered that Jenny was on hold, but I was afraid to switch back, afraid this might have been sent to me by mistake and I might lose it. Without taking my eyes off the screen for an instant I said, “Cher, send a message to Jenny. Tell her I’ll call her back.” I grabbed a cell phone, tapped the video camera icon, and aimed it at the screen. I paused the video. I rewound it.

Two years ago I was invited to speak about journalism at the VA’s career fair. During the Q and A, I was asked where story ideas come from. “Everywhere,” I’d said. “Everything you read, everything you see, every conversation. You’re always looking for something that sparks your curiosity. Then you start digging. And you dig and dig and dig, and then sometimes while you’re digging, a story drops on your head.” Like this one. I added one more tidbit. When you’re working on a story, it takes over your life, it’s always on your mind, and when that happens, you realize this isn’t your story, it’s the story that owns you. David Marash, the legendary Nightline correspondent, once described it to me as “going into the trance.” While you’re working on it, that story becomes the most important thing in your life. The only thing that matters. Well, I thought, here we go again. I pressed play.

The soldier’s face was barely visible. He had covered his tag with a strip of black tape. But he was wearing an embroidered black star. A colonel. “Son,” he said in that assholey condescending tone adopted by assholey officers. “What we have here is called a situation. You do know what a situation is, right?”

The audio was clear, although slightly out of sync.

“Yes, sir,” the man wearing the camera snapped, his voice crisper than an officer’s dress pants. “A situation is something between a shitstorm and a snafu. Sir!” I recognized that tone almost instantly. Marty fucking Shaw. Son of a bitch, I thought. He’s been holding on to this since the night of the raid.

I remembered watching the colonel being interviewed. I didn’t remember his name but it would be easy to find. Shaw continued, “Sir, obviously nobody wants me to know what’s going on here, but if anybody is crazy enough to believe the people in that house are terrorists, they are out of their friggin’ minds. Sir!”

Jesus.

Shaw must have taken a step backward, because the body cam suddenly showed the colonel’s face—just in time to capture that don’t-fuck-with-me look that I knew so well. “Lieutenant, right?”

“Yes, sir. Sir, please, I’m telling you—”

“You are telling me nothing, Lieutenant.” The colonel took two steps closer, limiting the image to a square of uniform. “Let me tell you sumthin’, hotshot. As of right now, this area is quarantined. Locked down. Your people are going to perimeter. This isn’t any picture show and I do not want any pictures, so order your people to turn off those fancy-schmancy body cameras…” As he said that, he literally poked Shaw’s camera, but didn’t seem to realize it was still taping. I actually had to laugh. I’ve been there: Sir, I was told to order my men to turn off their body cameras, which I did. I was not instructed to turn off my own cam.

The colonel continued with that same nasty, officious Platoon attitude. “Then I want your people doing a house-to-house to shut down any surveillance cameras. Rip ’em the fuck down if you have to. No civilians within a six-block radius. I don’t give a rat’s fuck if Grandma needs oxygen, I want every swinging dick and dickess out of this area within one hour, and I do not care how you get it done. I want these shit-boxes emptied, and the only people I want to see anywhere near this house will be wearing this patch.” I assumed he indicated his camouflaged unit patch. “Do you understand?”

Shaw did not respond. Nodding, I guess.

The colonel stepped back again and eased off his aggressive tone, “We may take some casualties, so I want wagons standing by and a clear path to the highway. One final thing, unless you want to find yourself picking your toes in Poughkeepsie, I don’t want any reporters getting close enough for me to smell them.” He leaned his face closer and added, “And, son, believe me, I smell like a son of a bitch.”

“Yes, sir!” Shaw agreed fervently. I was laughing so hard I almost missed his last few words: “If you say so, sir.”

The video went black for a second, and when it resumed, I was looking at a completely different scene. Someone had edited at least two segments together. This second one also was taped from another source; this original source appeared to be a monitor. This image had been recorded by a night-vision camera, so it washed out green with some hint of other colors. It was in a fixed position, and I had no idea where it was set up. I was looking at a circa 1950s suburban house. Locked up tight. Foliage in front partially covered the front windows. It looked like there might be lights on inside, but I couldn’t be certain; it could just as easily have been a reflection. There was no movement outside.

There was no sound. I checked the sound level to confirm that. No sound.

I recognized the house. I’d seen it on Zillow. Stratford Road. For several more seconds nothing happened. It could have been a photograph. Suddenly wisps of smoke burst from the front and side of the house. It took me another few seconds to realize bullets were smashing into brick and stucco. It had been more than a decade since I’d seen this same thing for myself, but I had no doubt that’s what it was. The rate of fire increased. All the windows were shattered, and a shutter fell off.

It was tough to watch. I looked around the office. Several people were working at desks, a small group was in conversation around the Keurig, and Howie was in his office, feet up on his desk, talking on the phone. Just a normal evening. And I was sitting there watching a house being blown to bits, knowing the eight people inside were being murdered.

The gunfire grew in intensity, reaching a crescendo; an explosion blew the front porch and door off the house. I didn’t see any indication of return fire, although it would have had the impact of a snowflake in a blizzard. In a corner of the screen I saw two men pouring fire into the house as they moved toward it.

Another explosion. Then another. Most of the house lifted off the ground, then slammed into a cloud of smoke. When that smoke dissipated, all that was left was debris. I couldn’t tell what type of munition had been fired, but it had to be more powerful than a mortar. Had to be. It could have been fired from a chopper, but it felt like ground fire. A Bradley, I guessed. I shook my head in wonder. A Bradley firing at a house on American soil. Wow.

Two more shells ripped into the pyre, taking out the remnants of a wall and the base of the chimney. The firing ebbed and gradually ended. Flames and black smoke rose from the rubble. No one was visible near the house. For several more seconds everything was quiet. Then boom! A secondary explosion sent bits of house hurtling toward the camera. It might have been caused by a stored pile of ammunition or a ruptured gas line. Whatever it was sent a towering needle of flame and thick smoke into the sky.

The video ended. I sat there, staring at the blank screen. Then I clicked off the phone camera, rested my elbow on Mighty Chair’s arm, and covered my mouth with my palm. Staring, thinking, trying to absorb what I had seen. And hadn’t seen. If a shot or shots had been fired from inside the house, as the government claimed, I would have seen flashes. There were no flashes. Maybe I would have seen a puff of smoke from a window. Nothing. No troops had gone near that flaming wreckage; there was no conceivable way anything inside—a computer, phone, or tablet—could have been recovered. This was a massacre. And now I had the evidence, evidence that the government was killing Americans and lying about it.

I just stared at my monitor. I took several deep, controlled breaths, trying to find my equilibrium.

The real question was what to do with this footage. It obviously put Shaw in jeopardy. My guess was he had saved it to cover his own ass if push came to indictment. He had tried to prevent it. He was only following orders. That first segment made it simple to trace it back to him; he could admit he’d made it but deny he sent it. “I gave it to the military.” No one was going to believe that. But it had to go public. When the American people saw it, they would … what? What would they do? Turn off Netflix? Send a tweet?

Suddenly the grainy video began running a second time. Marty was making sure I was able to make my own copy. I watched it again, this time looking more carefully to see if any shots came from the house.

It was no better the second time.

There was one thing I knew for certain: whatever I did with this tape, my life was going to change. For better, which admittedly was unlikely, or worse, I was in it. I did the smart thing: “Howie!” I screamed across the newsroom. “You’d better come over here and take a look at this.”

There was considerable debate inside the Pro about how to proceed. Billy Garvey, our tech whiz, had put my copy on all twelve of our monitors so we could watch the murders in SurroundVision. We reran it several times. Responses varied colorfully from “Holy shit!” to “What the fuck?” but everyone grasped its significance. We were all involved. Once seen, it couldn’t be unseen. An intern, Lauren Curtis-Bachman, wondered aloud if this was how Woodward and Bernstein felt when they met Mr. Throat.

The first and most important question was simple: Is it real? If we posted it and it was proved to have been edited or photoshopped, we’d have to close the doors. It also would force me to explore other career options. “It’s good,” I insisted, although I wouldn’t reveal the source, not even to Howie. “That’s your rule, Howie,” I told him. “Journalism 101.” Then I added the two words no reporter wants to hear: “Trust me.”

Second, do we inform the administration that this tape exists and ask for a response? I was against that, fearful they would claim some national security bullshit and prevent us from posting it. Besides, Frankie B. pointed out, once people saw this, the government would have plenty of opportunities to respond. Frank Biondo, our often-beleaguered advertising genius, expressed concern that the sure-to-ensue controversy might drive away timid advertisers, then responded defensively to the derisive staff comments, “Hey, I’m not advocating anything. I’m just explaining the facts of life.”

The fear that the government would prevent us from going public eventually outweighed all our other concerns. At my request—okay, insistence—we cut the first portion of the video, making it more difficult to trace it back to Shaw. Howie decided to post it exclusively on our site for four hours, then repost it to YouTube with our logo embedded. I wrote the introduction: “This video was forwarded to my attention on a social media platform. It was sent anonymously. I do not know its provenance, but I believe it was sent to me because of the interview I conducted with the mother of one of the men who died in the Stratford Road attack. (Link attached) While I have no way of confirming that this is an accurate recording of the events that took place that night, technical experts have examined the video and concluded to the best of their ability that it has not been doctored or photoshopped in any way.”

Frankie slapped a title on it, “Three Minutes That Shook Our World,” and posted it. Within an hour it had gone viral. Two hours later the FBI walked into the office and asked to speak with me. They handed me expensively embossed cards—he was O’Reilly, she was Pfiser. O’Reilly was older than Pfiser. His hair was cut close but in a stylish rather than a political manner; her blond hair was pinned in a bun. Her suit was nicer than his. They were both professional and polite. Howie and I sat with them in the glass-enclosed conference room while everyone else pretended not to be watching. “We’re simply trying to learn as much as possible about this video,” Pfiser said.

“Am I under oath?”

She wiggled her hands. “Not exactly. But lying to a federal agent during an investigation, whether or not you take an oath, can be prosecuted.”

“The penalties can be pretty tough,” O’Reilly added.

I told them the same thing I had written; the video had shown up and I didn’t know its source. And technically that was absolutely true.

O’Reilly asked pleasantly, “You have any idea who might have sent it?”

Howie started to respond, but I put a restraining hand on his arm. “I have a lot of sources, and even if I did know who sent it to me, I wouldn’t tell you. That’s the way the First Amendment works.” Why couldn’t I just shut up sometimes?

Agent Pfiser smiled with closed lips. “So you’re not actually denying you might know who sent it to you?”

I agreed with that. “I think I can say pretty confidently that I either do or do not know the source.” I glanced at Howie. “Howie?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding firmly, “that’s a good way of putting it.”

Pfiser dutifully wrote down my answer. Each of us in that room knew this whole interview was a charade. We were playing our roles. They knew they had to ask the questions; we all knew Howie and I weren’t going to answer them. I actually was a little embarrassed for them. After all, they probably had been yanked out of bed to come in and play this game. When they were done, we shook hands with both of them and I got ready to go home. I didn’t delude myself, though, I knew that wasn’t the end of it. Not even close.

By the following afternoon we had been overwhelmed by the avalanche of technology. This was as close as social media could come to the excitement of stopping the presses. The video became a front-page story in both the print and digital worlds. It was viewed more than 4 million times within a day. Our site crashed; new servers were added, and it crashed again. We still had some landlines in the office, which rang incessantly. Online, a roughly equal number of congratulatory and threatening comments were posted. Several current advertisers canceled existing contracts, while about the same number of new companies requested a rate sheet. Our IT guys strengthened the firewalls to fend off the hackers we knew would be coming after us. I couldn’t tell you how many requests I got from TV outlets and other media for an interview, but I turned down everything. There was nothing of importance I could add to those three minutes.

Among the people who called me was Miss Jenny Miller, calling in her capacity as congress member McDonnell’s chief of staff. Chairman McDonnell’s Homeland Security subcommittee was officially requesting a copy of the video and would like Roland Stone to appear voluntarily to answer a few questions. Rather than responding, in my capacity as a journalist I dutifully forwarded the request to the Pro’s attorney, Jon Lindsey, who politely turned it down, citing First Amendment protections.

Jenny was especially careful not to cross the line between her professional and personal worlds. That was our agreement, and we both stuck to it. It wasn’t exactly bedroom conversation; she never said, “Oh, I love how you touch me there, and by the way, where did you get that video?” And in response I never said, “Oooh, go ahead and subpoena me, baby.”

We did talk around it, though. At dinner several nights later, she asked me why I hadn’t tried to get a comment from the administration before running with it. Her tone suggested disapproval, but I didn’t want to get into it. I just said, “Sometimes we’re gonna find ourselves in a tricky spot. It’s just inevitable. The best thing we can do is avoid talking about it. Are you really gonna eat all those fries?”

The governing philosophy of the Wrightman administration appeared to be, What the American public doesn’t know can’t hurt us. In that, it was no different from any previous administration. The public remained remarkably loyal to the president until it found out about a transgression, be it a blow job or a mass murder. Then a sense of betrayal kicked in.

This video did significant damage. After the endless lies and duplicity of Trump/Pence, Americans had latched onto Wrightman’s boring integrity. They liked him because they trusted him, and they trusted him because they liked him.

Real video versus fake video reignited the battles that had been fought throughout Trump/Pence. Polling showed that overall support for the administration was declining substantially, but the intensity among those people who continued to support Wrightman increased significantly as those people doubled down on their beliefs.

In an effort to position Ian Wrightman as more user-friendly, his pollster, Nolan Noyes, arranged an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show. Charisma dressed him to convey the desired image: a suede jacket without a tie, a just-one-of-the-great-outdoors-guys look. The purported reason was to discuss his daughter America’s upcoming nuptials. “You’re darn right, Jimmy, that I’ll have tears in my eyes when I kiss my baby on the altar.”

Later in this interview, when pushed by Jimmy, the president admitted sheepishly that he had never really wanted to be president. His years in the Senate were the happiest of his life. “But let me tell you, when I was asked to serve the American people by bridging the gap between Democrats and Republicans…”—he chuckled at the memory—“well, no man who loves this country could have turned it down.”

Jenny and I were in bed. I started humming “God Bless America.” She slapped my hand.

Yes, the job was even more difficult than he had imagined it would be, he admitted. Yes, there had been many sleepless nights. No, he hadn’t lost his enthusiasm for improving the lives of every American. Yes, now that his team was finally in place, he would soon be announcing a series of additional measures that will make the country stronger and safer.

When the show returned after a brief commercial break, Wrightman took the opportunity to address “the growing concern” about “that strange unsourced video” that was circulating. “Frankly, Jimmy,” he said, looking directly into the camera, shaking his head and tossing open his hands in bewilderment, “we don’t know where it came from. But I can tell you with all my heart…”—he tapped his chest twice with his right hand to emphasize his sincerity—“that it doesn’t reflect accurately the reality on the ground that night. And I have to tell you, it really gets my dander up to see people impugning the integrity of those brave Americans who literally put their lives on the line for all of us.”

The audience burst into cheers. To me, at least, the guy had all the sincerity of a love letter from a lonely Russian beauty. It surprised me that anyone would believe any of this, but then I remembered, at least he isn’t Trump. Of course, all of this was the setup for the real reason for this appearance.

Jimmy leaned closer to the president and asked him, man to man, “Where do you think the video came from? What do you think about those stories it was produced by Russians to cause dissension?”

Wrightman grimaced; darn, that was a painful thought. With obvious reluctance he finally agreed, “Truthfully, Jimmy, we haven’t been able to rule that out.”

The administration followed up that appearance with the strongest tried and true political strategy: Promise them money. The next afternoon the secretary of the treasury, Penelope Farber, announced “a reverse tax credit.” To further stimulate the economy, a $1,000 tax credit was being granted to all Americans earning $40,000 annually or less. For people counting at home, this was the twelfth attempt to use tax credits to convince people to begin spending at pre-pandemic levels. “This stimulus will pay for itself by the increased economic activity it creates,” the secretary explained. “So we’re confident this new benefit will not increase the deficit one penny. Consider it an early Christmas present.” It was late August.

Even that diversion didn’t stop the decline in Wrightman’s approval numbers. The growing acceptance that he had mistakenly authorized the raid in which innocent people had been killed and then tried to cover it up fueled the furor. Mistakes were acceptable; cover-ups were not. We saw the anger at the Pro every day. We became sort of a central clearinghouse for people to vent their frustration. Among the obvious changes, a security guard was stationed at the door and Howie was forced to rent an expensive X-ray system to scan every piece of mail.

Ambitious politicians from both parties seized the opportunity to come out strongly and bravely in support of the truth. Several members of the House angrily demanded that a congressional committee be formed to investigate why no congressional committee had been formed to investigate this raid.

Millions of Americans had voted for Wrightman demanding only one thing from him: That he tell the truth. That tenuous belief they had placed in his administration was suddenly shaky. The lie was like a dab of toothpaste stuck to your finger: no matter what Wrightman did, he couldn’t shake it off.

I watched all this happening with the growing sense of dread that I was right about my fears. The American people don’t like to be told what to do. Rather, they like to be manipulated into being told what to do. They had been told not to hold large demonstrations. Exactly nobody was surprised when pro- and antiadministration demonstrations erupted into brawls. Law enforcement did as much as possible to keep the two sides apart, but they were outnumbered. Street fights broke out in a dozen cities. Cars were set on fire. Rioters in several cities crashed through the downtown area, breaking windows and looting stores. It was difficult to watch this without thinking of the chorus from We’re Your Children’s 2021 “smash” hit, “Welcome to Portland,” “It ain’t pretty, burning a city; it ain’t no fun, but it gotta be done…”

Video from Detroit, where it had all started, showed police officers in full riot gear spread across a street, clear plexiglass shields protecting them from rocks and glass bottles, inexorably pushing the mob backward.

I was incredulous, knowing I had at least some responsibility for this. But even as I watched this happening, I couldn’t keep myself from wondering, Where the heck are people getting glass bottles from these days?

The White House continued testing different strategies to change the narrative. Initially Wrightman had halted the Trumpist efforts to elevate the alternative media into respectability, ignoring unregulated sites like QAnon, TTT3, and 4chan. These conspiracy sites allowed anyone to anonymously post stories, but during the Trump years, on occasion these bizarre claims slithered into legitimate media, like sludge seeping out of grease traps. Initially when that happened, the government editor gave them the O for opinion, although in fact they deserved a B for bullshit. But Munchmeyer’s propaganda office understood the value of these sites in getting out stories that supported the administration agenda to gullible people. While they still published an abundance of the usual Zombies Are Real and Voting Illegally in Wisconsin and Proof Found That Hillary Is an Extraterrestrial, more stories supporting administration initiatives began appearing: for example, Administration Adding Safeguards as China’s 100-Year Plan to Conquer America Enters Final Decade. Several stories about the Detroit raid appeared on these sites; what was chilling is that the editor gave them an N, news, which made them more believable.

The administration also continued its efforts to distract and distort. The Defense Department announced that three more people involved in planning the 7/11 attacks had been killed in a missile attack outside Mogadishu. The raid was a joint exercise of American and Somalian Special Operators, acting on information supplied by unnamed allies. “For those people keeping score at home,” Chris Wallace reported, “that brings the number of terrorist leaders killed in the last six weeks to seventeen, although at least two of them purportedly have been killed multiple times.”

I did note that the administration had completely given up trying to tie any retribution to information taken from the house on Stratford Road. That effort had ended.

I was watching Wallace losing the fight to prevent himself from smirking as he read this report when Jenny called. In a voice infused with an odd mix of resignation and anxiety, she said, “Two guys from Homeland Security just left my office. They were asking all about you.”

Homeland Security? That was interesting. “Not FBI?”

“That’s what they said. They were…” She paused and obviously read from a note or card: “Jackson and Devine.”

Jackson and Devine? “They sound like they should be on late-night TV advertising for people who slipped on fruit in a supermarket.”

“This isn’t funny, Rollie.” I was Rollie when she wanted to make a point. “They asked me a lot of questions about our relationship.”

“What’d you tell them?”

She sighed. “Basically, that you’re a rotten dancer.” She knew it was a cute line, but there were no smiles in her tone. This visit had shaken her up. “I mean, what could I tell them? I don’t even know how to describe it.”

“So the government of the United States knows we’re dating,” I said, trying to lighten the conversation. “I hope they don’t tell Europe.”

She completely ignored the fact that I’d ignored her comment. “It was more than that. They’re investigating you. They didn’t even ask about the video. They asked me if you gambled or drank, if you owed anybody money. They even asked me if I thought you were mad at the government because, you know…”—she hesitated here, not certain how I would react—“… because of what happened to you.”

I literally could feel my anger rising, my face flushed. I pressed down hard on my emotions. My index finger, I noticed, was thumping away. Well, that was an interesting outlet for them.

“Rollie?”

“I’m here. It’s okay.”

She misread my silence. “I had to talk to them. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me not to cooperate with Homeland Security in an invest—”

“It’s okay,” I interrupted. “It doesn’t matter. Here’s what’s happening, I think.” I was as curious as Jenny was to hear what came out of my mouth, so I would know what my subconscious thought about this. “They know there’s no way I would give up my source, so they’re trying to intimidate me. Or us. They know how I feel about you, so questioning you is their way of warning me.”

“They do? Really? Sometimes I’m not even sure how you feel about me. Maybe I should be the one asking questions.”

“Jenny,” I said, lowering my voice to demonstrate that I was serious, “there is no one in this world I would rather roll with than you.” Sometimes being corny will suffice.

It was her failure to come back with some sort of snappy retort that made me uneasy. Instead she said she had to go back to work and would call later. After we hung up, I sat there trying to decide what was more difficult: understanding this woman or saving American democracy.

I focused on what I could handle. What the hell was Homeland Security’s objective? Maybe I was right, maybe they were firing a warning shot. Well, I definitely got that message, fuck you very much.

The Washington curfew was still in force; soldiers patrolled the mostly empty streets. Truck-mounted spotlights cast long angular shadows across the avenues and up the sides of buildings. I was stopped twice while walking to the garage to get Van. I produced identification without giving them the usual hard time. I just didn’t have the energy.

By the time I got home, I’d managed to compartmentalize my thoughts. I had to reassure Jenny. A comfortable night at home would help. We’d order in, I’d let her choose the restaurant. Even Mexican if she wanted. Okay, I thought, it’s time to have that conversation, time to take the next step.

Then I opened my front door.