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.”