After an instant of silence as we all absorbed that, the room erupted into a mishmash of disbelief, refusal, and complaints. We were journalists, reporters. Our job was to inform. This was one of the most significant stories in American history. Go home? I had never before seen any quit in Howie.

He stood there, letting it play out. Finally he turned. His hands were still stuffed in his back pockets, but now tears were running down his face. “Lock it up,” he ordered in a tone that left no room for compromise. “Go home. Now.” Then he went into his office, closing the door behind him.

In retrospect, that probably was the right decision. There was no book entitled What to Do Till the Police Come for You. We lacked all protocol. Nothing prepared any of us for this; there were no instructions in the employee handbook. There was a lot of grumbling, but the office emptied quickly.

Jenny and I exchanged texts. “Going home,” I wrote. “See you there?”

“Crazed,” she responded. “The Hill is in chaos. No idea what’s going on. I’ll call later. Love you.”

“Okay. Love you too.” What else could I say? I decided to stop at Lucille’s, I wanted to be with people, but when I got in front of the place, I saw that the steel gate had been pulled down and all the lights were off.

My memories of that night are hazy. I do remember sitting in front of my TV watching the networks reporting the story. Truthfully, it was more announcing than reporting. I was not surprised that reactions ranged from mildly supportive to wildly supportive. There was literally no criticism. None. (Some media outlets knew how to retain their license.) It suddenly seemed obvious the administration had been laying the groundwork for this since the day Wrightman moved into the White House. I sat in my living room, sipping a beer, then a second and a third, speaking with different people and exchanging texts with others. Bottom line, no one had any idea what was going on, what was going to happen, or how to react.

Jenny didn’t call. She sent several more texts, all of them telling me in different ways that the Hill was in an uproar. People were running from meeting to meeting, trying to figure out how to stop this. Reactions there ranged from satisfaction and support to anger and tears.

Satisfaction to tears? That was a pretty wide spread and an accurate appraisal. Me? Mostly, I think, I felt lost. I felt like I was floating, waiting to see which way the winds would blow me. For someone like me, a person used to charging through the days with a plan, a direction, and an objective to guide me, this rootlessness was terrifying. Having absolutely no idea what to do, I fell back on the security of routine.

The gym was nearly empty the following morning. The scent of antiseptic from the overnight cleaning was still hanging in the air when I got there. A teenager was punishing the heavy bag, a dream in every punch. A ponytailed woman in a gray T-shirt was standing over a weighted bar, practicing the new psycholifting technique in which she visualized lifting it. It must have been a hard visualization, because a single dark gray line of sweat ran crookedly down the front of her shirt. But Hack wasn’t there. I needed to get an answer from him, nothing got started until I had that. He didn’t show. That wasn’t surprising. After Wrightman’s speech, I imagined it had to be a pretty hectic day inside those nonexistent agencies. But still, the fact that he hadn’t responded to my texts was disconcerting. I hesitated to call him. At that moment I probably wasn’t the most desirable phone pal for a government agent.