It was time for the day’s budget. Foreign had a roundup of battles—the assault on Mosul, ambushes in Kandahar—one dead, two wounded. Sports had a track star testing positive for drugs. Business had regulators charging a high tech with fraud and a brite on Facebook. Metro had a shooting that wounded three at Edgewood Terrace and a raid on a money-wiring business moving cash to Pakistan. National had the first day of a gay-marriage package—news lede-all from the religion reporter, A1 Features with a portrait of a lesbian couple. Style was pushing a scene story for the front.

Stanley scanned the budget for the crash. The story, if you could call it that, had made it only into the last few thousand copies of the paper; and it was only a few inches long. But the front-page photograph, of the fire in the river, was four columns wide across the top. The photographer had shot at water level from the Virginia side of the Potomac. That angle put the Watergate in the background. It looked as if war had come—to Washington.

The top said a pilot had experienced mechanical difficulties in a warplane and ejected prior to the crash. The aircraft had taken off from Andrews Air Force Base. It was part of the fighter wing flying combat air-patrol missions over the capital. The wing commander said a preliminary finding would be finished in about six weeks. A more thorough inquiry was expected to take four to six months. The name and condition of the pilot were not released.

“Adam,” Martina was saying, the skin on her forehead like her wrists, thinned to transparency, “as you know from last night, this was not the story we had thought.” She looked around the room to see if anyone needed an explanation. “Training crash,” someone said noncommittally. Stanley craned to see who it was. It must have been the Foreign editor, who continued, “Nice photo.”

“It was more than a photo for the folks living in the Watergate,” said the Metro editor. He was jauntily disrespectful to the solemn echelons of National and Foreign. Always jiving, is how he would have been referred to in Stanley’s time.

“I think you have a point,” Adam said. “Three inches got into, what, a few thousand copies? Is Mitch working on it?”

“He’s moved to the Foreign Desk,” Martina said of the Pentagon correspondent, past retirement age, a resistor of all buyouts. He predated even the summer of ′71. That year, Mitch had been the National editor when Adam was an intern. “Last night the White House had it as a helicopter,” Martina continued. “They had the president on board. Ground casualties. You know this better than anyone, Adam. But it was an F-16, actually. The president was asleep in the White House. No one injured or dead on the ground. The pilot survived.”