You heard it first from me

I suppose it’s only a matter of time before someone blows the cover of Triablogue, so you might as well hear it from me.

Yes, Triablogue is a hoax, but a genuine hoax, like genuine gnawgahide.

This is how it all got started. I used to sell vinyl siding at Wall-Mart.

(That’s also where Bill Gates was recruited. We were coworkers. But that’s another story.)

Then one evening as I was listening to The Best of Loretta Lynn, a Viper with tinted windows drew up to my mobile home. Two men in trench coats and dark glasses got out and knocked on the door.

They drove me to a private jet, which flew me to Sicily, where “Dr. James Anderson” (not his real name) has his winter residence—a seaside villa overlooking the Bay of Naples.

There I also got to meet his wife Lucrezia, an almond-eyed, olive-skinned stunner, and their two Russian Wolfhounds—Scylla & Charybdis.

That’s when he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Either I could come work for him as his front-man—Triablogue is really a shell corporation to launder funds for the Carlyle Group, the theological stuff is only there to throw INTERPOL off the scent—or else his trench-coated security detail would give me a chance to do some undersea exploration in the Bay of Naples.

As a man of unbending principle, I chose the former.

I currently work out of the basement of a small governmental office in Brasilia.

Every Friday afternoon at 2:45 sharp, a man in dark glasses and a trench coat presents me with a manila envelope containing a roll of nonsequential C-bills to remunerate me for my efforts.

I usually receive my operating instructions from Dr. Anderson via secure video, although we occasionally speak face-to-face, whether at his winter residence, or his summer residence—overlooking Lake Lucerne—or his super yacht, docked in Monte Carlo.

Needless to say, my team members are also not what they seem to be.

Evan May is a 72-year old Green Beret who supplements his fixed income by working on the side as a bookie for fellow residents of his retirement home. Mostly horseracing.

Gene Bridges is a Russian Orthodox Metropolitan who impersonates a Southern Baptist to plant insidious seeds of division and rancor within the SBC.

Paul Manata is executive producer of Teletubbies.

I could tell you who Jason Engwer is, but you’d have to take out a life insurance policy.