The talk show hosts and news anchors asked these folks many probing questions, like, “This is all very upsetting, isn’t it?” and “If he were alive right now what message do you believe poor, murdered Konstantin would like to deliver to our millions of viewers?”

One man wisely intoned on a BBC channel, “In a world of scarce power, scarcer water, and new enemies cropping up every day, the Russians are clearly not content to play second fiddle to places like China and India, or even the United States.” The fellow went on to add that the Russians had tried democracy and they did not care for it. The Russian Bear was about to assert itself once more and the world had better damn well take notice.

The world had taken notice, because the speaker of these words was none other than Sergei Petrov, the former number two man in the successor entity to the KGB, the Federal Security Service. He’d barely escaped his homeland with his life. Any day now he said he expected to be struck down by a bullet, bomb, or polonium-210-laced coffee for his candor. He’d also been well paid for his remarks from a source totally unknown to him. People were still trying to ferret out if all this was true or not. But they’d get no help from Petrov, for he had no love lost for his homeland.

Yet the real question on everyone’s mind was, who was behind all this, and why were they doing it? And despite this being the information age, no one could find a definitive answer to that, for a very simple reason that most people overlooked: in the information age, there were not millions of places to hide, there were trillions.

The multiple crises in the Middle East were forgotten. Crazy Kim in North Korea was relegated to the back pages. Every U.S. presidential candidate in the upcoming election was asked the same question: “What do you intend to do about a country with almost as many nukes as the United States and a past full of world-domination-minded leaders?”