Detonating the bomb in a safe location is a PR trick of last resort. If you know you are about to be punched in the face, would you rather have Mike Tyson do it or some guy named “Mike” from the accounting department? I’d take my chances with the guy who is good with spreadsheets. In this analogy, the champ would be the New York Times, and Mike from accounting would be email newsletters, less prominent digital news organizations, and trade and local publications. Outlets like this are often referred to as “tier-two” publications. There are great reporters at these publications, and they often break news that forces the “tier-one” publications to play catch-up. However, unless it is a really big story, breaking news in a tier-two will ensure that it is not covered in the larger publications. This makes the tier-twos a relatively safe location.

  If you catch wind that one of the tier-one publications—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal—or one of the wire services is investigating your client, you need to do damage assessment. Find out exactly what they have on the client. Force the client to tell you the truth. Then ask your client who they would like to get hit by? Tyson or the geek from accounting? This usually clarifies their thinking. You then pitch the negative story yourself. You compile all the data and resources needed to publish it. Leave nothing out. No room for additional reporting. Then give the reporter an hours-long embargo date. Tell them you are going to other reporters in a few hours. This is to ensure that you “scoop” the tier-one publication already pursuing your client.

  The “tier-two” story runs. If you have been in touch with a reporter for the New York Times in this hypothetical example, they will call you. And they will be apoplectic. Your relationship with this reporter is now over.

  This is not the most sustainable media strategy. You cannot do this on a regular basis. However, once in a while—after you’ve weighed the story’s importance against creating an enemy out of a journalist—it’s worth it.

  It’s not good enough for my new boss, though. She wants a hit job on the guy doing a hit job. It’s an impossible task.

  Her next request of me escalates things. It involves spies, hacked data, and a notoriously dangerous foreign embassy. I’m supposed to be the fixer, making the connections so that the information and money can change hands. My boss assures me it’s legal and that if I’m successful my firm will get millions of dollars. And I’ll get another helping of PTSD, maybe another visit from the FBI.

  I have the demoralizing realization that I’m caught in a loop. I’m trapped in the bowels of a PR machine where I spin around and around questionable operatives, shady deals, and legal peril. The faces change. The offices change. My job remains the same. I grease the wheels of a machine that pulls the levers for those in power, or simply those who have money, to keep those same people in power. And I’m good at it.

  Part of me wants to break this loop. Walk out on this job right now and open a bar in Maryland. I’d man the kitchen and tell war stories to the regulars. But my instinct, the part of me that has pulled this off for nearly two decades, thinks, You know how to do this. This is all you know and all you will ever know. This is who you are. Now go do what you do.

  At BLJ, I would have gone through with this assignment without thinking twice. After my suicide attempt, a switch in my brain has finally been flipped. I can’t start heading down a road that will only lead back to that dark place, because the next time, I won’t crawl back out. So, I stop, sit Lindsay down at the dining room table, and tell her what I’m about to do.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” she asks. “The FBI was just here.”

  “Maybe they’ll get the right apartment this time,” I say, trying to break bad news with humor, something my shrink says I do a little too often.

  “This sounds like it’s breaking so many laws, I don’t know where to start. You need to start by calling your lawyer.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet,” I say.

  “It’s your choice,” Lindsay says, anger leaving her face, replaced by a frightening look of resignation. “It’s insane to me that you’d even consider it, but you need to take care of yourself. You can’t trust your firm to protect you. Their interest is in making money. It’s your choice, Phil. It’s always your choice. Just be prepared to live with the consequences.”

  I head up to the roof and call my lawyer.

  “As usual, Lindsay is right,” Saltzman says. “This is all kinds of illegal.”

  * * *

  I’m in Sonoma, California, attending a swanky wedding for one of Lindsay’s old colleagues at a liberal think tank. At the reception, guests in eco-friendly, sustainably sourced cotton attire sip champagne at a winery surrounded by ornate gardens. It’s a DC cocktail party moved three thousand miles west. With more linen.

  I’m standing with a group of Hillary Clinton acolytes when my phone rings. I step away and take the call. My boss harangues me about PowerPoint slides for one of our questionable clients. If anyone at the wedding heard this conversation, I’d be asked to leave.

  “I can’t get to my computer right now,” I say. “I told you I was away this weekend.”

  “Do it,” comes the curt reply.

  I step into a hedge garden and call Richard Levick, who listens while I vent in a whisper. “I can’t do this anymore,” I say. “Everyone at this wedding is a decent human being who thinks they’re saving the world, and I’m the guy on the other side.”

  “It’s just client work,” Levick consoles. “It’s like when we repped the payday lenders.”

  These calls are a PR guy’s version of a support group. I can talk with another flak without fear of judgment, knowing they won’t bat an eyelash at things that would make the policy institute set at this reception throw a drink in my face. Levick understands because he’s done these things, too.

  “It’s not as bad as Nigeria,” he tells me. “Come see me when you’re back.”

  When I land in DC, I grab a cab directly to the stone house Levick lives in at the edge of Rock Creek Park. It’s stabilizing to see my old mentor. He’s just come back from a hike in the park, and he’s wearing a gray tracksuit. In his study, he uncorks the expensive stuff, and I tell him about the dangerous assignment I refused, the one involving a foreign embassy. It’s difficult to shock a man who’s been in the PR game for three decades, but Levick is incensed.

  “I’m not a practicing lawyer. But I’m enough of a lawyer to know that you need to get away from this firm,” he tells me.

  “What do I do?”

  “Quit.”

  “I need the job,” I say.

  “‘An older boy told me to do it’ is not a legal defense,” Levick says. “You are going to be held responsible for any actions you take.”

  It’s good advice.

  The next morning, I head to the office. I think of Levick’s words from last night and call Lindsay. I’ve finally set a deadline for myself, which means something different to me than it does to journalists. The word deadline originated in the American Civil War, when a line was drawn in the dirt around prisons. Guards were instructed to shoot any prisoner who crossed the line—the “deadline.” I’ve drawn my own deadline in the sand, knowing that if I cross it, I won’t come back. I’d like to say that a moral epiphany or a newfound ethical backbone spurred this decision. Truth is, it’s pragmatic. I set this deadline to stay alive.

  “I think I need to quit,” I tell Lindsay.

  “Do it,” she says. “Just go. You’ll find something better.”

  “Thank you,” I say, floored by her confidence in me.

  I am barely off the phone with Lindsay when I call human resources. “My time here has come to an end,” I say.

  “When do you want your last day to be?”

  “Right now.”

  “The CEO is in town and would like to talk to you.”

  “I don’t think I’d learn very much from that conversation.”

  I grab my things and beeline for the exit. I’m almost out the door when I see a junior staffer looking at me. “Where are you going?” he asks. “We have a meeting in ten.”

  “I just quit.”

  “You can do that?” he asks.

  CHAPTER 12

  Fix You

  A steady-handed nurse locates a vein in my arm and slips in a butterfly needle. I plug in my earphones as she attaches a syringe of ketamine mixed with saline solution to an infusion pump. She pushes a button on the pump, and the pump begins to depress the syringe millimeter by millimeter. I sit back in the movie theater–style chair, start my playlist, and wait for the drug to hit my bloodstream.

  The first wave is subtle, a warm chemical wash. Then it builds, and I dissociate from my body. The Pink Floyd song in my ears is my only tether to physical reality. Distortions appear—first circles made of color and light, then a parade of images. I flash to memories, viewing them from the perspective of a dispassionate observer. Moments from a life that belongs to someone else.

  A young man with raccoon circles under his eyes sits outside a familiar bar. He scribbles a jumble of words about the World Cup on a cocktail napkin. He slumps, his body tense with worry. People inside the bar laugh and shout jovially. The young man is alone with his drink and his task. The cocktail napkin morphs into a newspaper. Then a smartphone, its screen covered with texts and notifications. The young man does not yet know about Qatar’s neo-feudalist Kafala labor system. He is unaware that Bangladeshi, Indian, Nepalese, and Filipino migrant workers will slave to build gleaming, monstrous soccer stadiums. He does not know that thousands of these indentured servants will die before the first match is played. I watch the young man, understanding that he is but a small part of a larger machine. I hold him accountable for his many mistakes, but I do not hate him for them.

  Coldplay’s “Fix You” begins playing in my earphones, guiding me to a memory of Lindsay’s touch the night I nearly ended my life. I understand how badly she wanted to help me overcome my depression, feel the force of her love as she rushed to my rescue in my moment of greatest need. I become more aware of how lucky I am to have her support. I feel connected to my wife in ways I cannot express but am deeply grateful to experience.

  After forty-five minutes, I feel myself return to the room. Dr. Patrick Oliver, a stocky, middle-aged man in a white lab coat, comes to check on me.

  “How was the strength of the dose?” he asks.

  “Perfect,” I say.

  Dr. Oliver has devoted his life to helping people with suicidal ideation, yet he speeds through the streets of DC on a Ducati racing motorcycle. We get along just fine. When I walked into the MindPeace Clinic a year and a half ago, Dr. Oliver asked what had brought me in.

  “Several things fucked me up,” I said. “My job being one of them.”

  Dr. Oliver explained that my brain is powered by neural pathways that look like branches of a tree; they are delicate and sophisticated. Decades of mistreated mental illness and PTSD incurred from my job have killed those branches. Ketamine helps regrow them. Without it, depression creates a delta between how I should feel and how I actually feel. If the events of the day make a healthy brain feel nine out of ten on a happiness scale, they make my brain register a two.

  I’m not alone, especially in DC. Many of Dr. Oliver’s patients have high-level security clearances. They work on the Hill and at the Pentagon. Dr. Oliver has a hypothesis that high-stress jobs burn out neural pathways at an alarming rate, and though this hypothesis hasn’t been scientifically proven it certainly mirrors my experience.

  My case is laced with an extra tinge of irony. The very essence of my job requires that I communicate effectively, yet I struggle to do that in my own mind. The very thing I’m so effective at professionally, my brain is incapable of on a physiological level.

  Ketamine isn’t a magic bullet, but I’ve felt steady improvement over the last year and a half. I feel like my disease is being treated for the first time ever. Plus it’s a legal way to get really high for an hour every few weeks. Lindsay says I’m no longer as flat, that I’m more communicative and emotive, and that I laugh like I used to.

  And ever since Dr. Oliver put a needle in my arm, I haven’t been drawn to work that smells illegal or worked for any blood-soaked dictators. I’ve got my deadline, and I’m sticking to it. Like Doc Brown in Back to the Future, I’ve survived stealing from the Libyans, and I want to do something meaningful with my second chance.

  Surprisingly, the opportunity comes through Preston. He video-calls me from his home trading desk, sipping an IPA drafted fresh from the kegerator hardwired into the granite wet bar he had installed last spring.

  “I’m plugged in with a group of former special forces operators and contractors,” he says.

  “Doesn’t surprise me.”

  “One of them, a guy named RJ, owns a company that makes precision weapons for special forces outfits,” Preston says. “When tier-one outfits need mission-specific one-off gear, RJ provides it. He designed and built my daughter’s rifle by hand using a micrometer. It took ten months. He makes art.”

  “I’ll bet you two hit it off.”

  “On the East Coast, we’re functionally behind enemy lines for anything concerning the Second Amendment,” Preston says. “Guys with a common interest in weaponry can smell each other like animals.”

  “Same breed.”

  “Bingo,” Preston says. “RJ is working with a team of former tier-one operators who are running ratlines with active special forces on the ground in Ukraine. These guys are under deep cover observing and reporting on the Russian invasion.”

  RJ’s team has discovered that Putin’s war has put the Ukrainian Junior Olympic gymnastics team in grave danger. In the former Eastern Bloc, gymnasts are as popular as baseball players are in the United States—which makes them prime Russian targets. The gymnasts are all under the age of seventeen and scattered around the country. But RJ’s team has come up with an extraction plan. Charter a passenger plane into an active war zone and transport the athletes to the U.S. Olympic training center in Colorado Springs.

  “I can secure the airplane,” Preston says. “I hate to say it, but we need your contacts in DC. Can you grease some wheels?”

  Over the next two months, I set up Zoom calls between RJ and the media, who want an exclusive, and connect RJ with potential donors who can fund the extraction. The rescue op stalls when we hit State Department red tape. Transporting minors over international borders may trip human trafficking laws. Undeterred, a member of RJ’s team liaisons with a volunteer firm of retired special forces operators called Project SIRIN. Project SIRIN’s network gathers intel on supplies the Ukrainian military needs in the combat theater. The Ukrainians desperately require night vision and thermal optics, which are used to detect an enemy in darkness through heat. As they defend their cities from Russian attack, the Ukrainians have no nighttime capabilities. Sitting ducks in the dark.

  “Thermal optics are god powers,” Preston informs me on the three-way Zoom with RJ.

  “They’ll give the tip of the spear the ability to assault at night, when the Russians are sleeping,” RJ says.

  “I don’t care if you’re in a ghillie suit, you show up bright as a set of headlights in the middle of a field,” Preston adds. “It’s a kill cheat code. I have thermals mounted on my forward optic on what I call my medium-sized gun.”

  I wonder what Preston has equipped on his large-size gun.

  “You can’t really appreciate thermals until you use them,” Preston continues.

  “Hope I never have to,” I say.

  “I’ll take a bad firearm with a good optic over a good firearm with a bad optic any day of the week.”

  Project SIRIN can facilitate the transfer of night vision and thermal optics to Ukrainian snipers. Delivery requires navigating a web of operators and regulators. Any transfer of arms technology, down to a ballistics calculator, must abide by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). If civilians like us shipped military-grade materials without ITAR approval, we’d go to federal prison, likely for the rest of our lives.

  But I happen to drink with an arms dealer at Commissary. If you want to legally move guns, money, or people around the earth, she knows how to do the paperwork. Soon, the optics are loaded onto a cargo plane bound for a secret destination. In Ukraine, the matériel has an immediate impact. RJ’s team receives dispatches from Ukrainian special forces thanking them for the resources to defend their homeland. “They are not only pushing back the Russians, they are going on counteroffensives,” RJ says, filling me in. “They are taking back their cities.”

  The American operators in Ukraine call the operation one of the most incredible moments in their twenty-plus years working with local forces. The motto stitched onto their jackets reads, “De oppresso liber,” Latin for “Free the Oppressed.” Helping underarmed, outgunned Ukrainians fight against Putin’s tyrannical invasion fulfills their ultimate call to service.

  But the war isn’t over. Russia mounts counteroffensives. Publicizing Project SIRIN’s work will drive more funding for aid. I know that Karoun Demirjian, a national security reporter with the Washington Post, will be interested in the story.

  “This is new,” Demirjian says when I call. “Aren’t you the guy who used to work for dictators?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I am.”

  If there is a silver lining to having worked for the likes of Gaddafi and Assad, it’s that reporters will always take my call. They know I’m usually mixed up in something interesting.

  * * *

  At the MindPeace Clinic, a nurse hands me an iPad. I scroll through a series of multiple-choice questions, each with four potential answers that feed data to my “Mood Monitor.”