The what, when, and where were finished, the why was pretty obvious, so it was time for the how and the who. As horrific as it was, even I had to admit pulling off an attack of this magnitude was an impressive feat. It had required a level of planning, logistics, and security our intel hadn’t believed the known terrorist organizations were capable of pulling off, especially considering all of the safeguards the Wrightman administration had put into place in its first few months.

My military background and the sacrifice I had made for this country, which admittedly I was not above exploiting when useful, had enabled me to make some pretty good background source contacts in the dark world. I threw out lines to the initials—the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and other lesser known smarties. The damage done to the American intelligence community by the Trump/Pence administration had been substantial, cutting their budgets, their staffs, and their capabilities. The Biden people had plugged the dam but hadn’t rebuilt it. Today was the payoff for that. Those people who would talk to me had zilch. One of them, a liaison to the White House, told me off the record that when Secretary of Defense Eldon “Rip” McCord saw that macabre video of the bones floating in the Pearl Harbor surf, he had exploded in anger, screaming, “Fuck ’em! Fuck all of those bastards!”

In response, President Wrightman had asked the obvious question: “Fuck who exactly?” That same deep source told me that when it was clear the attacks had ended, the president had leaned back in his chair, spread his arms in dismay, and asked his assembled cabinet, “Now what the fuck are we supposed to do?”

No one had responded.

Within hours I had posted several stories. My first piece confirmed what everybody already knew, that no one knew anything. I had actually become pretty good about writing convincingly about nothing. I included several quotes from my “well-placed anonymous sources” inside the government telling me knowledgeably that they had no new information and nothing to say “at this time.” I had learned early in my career that putting quotation marks around a few essentially meaningless words gives readers the impression that those words must have some deeper meaning.

My second piece focused on the new role that social media was playing in American society. Had this taken place only a few years earlier, the vast majority of people would have told their phone to speed-dial family and friends. No longer. Seconds after the initial bulletin, people had begun reaching out to me through social media platforms, in particular Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I just assumed that was typical, that everybody had the same experience. To be candid, who was going to know if I was wrong? I turned to my experts in academia, who were always available and always good for a quote, knowing they could use the tear sheet to demonstrate their importance in their field. My go-to sociologist, Dr. Richard Soll, noted that the fundamental change caused by these platforms was that “Rather than contacting loved ones to make sure they were safe, as was traditional, people immediately posted their own feelings in response to these events. That demonstrated society was becoming considerably more ‘me-oriented.’” (Notice my use of quotation marks!) For me, the real importance of this piece was that it kept Howie off my back for an hour.