The decision to bomb the office of the radical Jew lawyer was reached with relative ease. Only three people were involved in the process. The first was the man with the money. The second was a local operative who knew the territory. And the third was a young patriot and zealot with a talent for explosives and an astonishing knack for disappearing without a trail. After the bombing, he fled the country and hid in Northern Ireland for six years.
Before they met, he knew nothing of the book, or the story surrounding it.
“And so, Mr. Swain, everybody might be guilty of this crime. Everybody except you? Is that right?”
The first indication that Professor Benjamin Bradshaw’s life was about to plunge again into chaos appeared in the form of a flatulent horse eating Mrs. Prouty’s broad beans over the garden fence, its huge teeth tugging greedily at the vines.
In retrospect, it would have been better if my wife had let me stay home to see “Meet the Press” instead of making me schlep across town to watch Jim Wallace die.
On Christmas Eve 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab began the journey he thought would take him from this world into the next, and into the awaiting embrace of six dozen virgins. He carried nothing more than a small duffle bag and, in his underwear, the ingredients for plastic explosives. If not for some fumbling on the part of the aspiring bomber and the reflexes of a few passengers and the crew, Northwest Airlines Flight 253 would have exploded somewhere over Watford, Ontario.
I sat in the back pew and watched the only woman I would ever love marry another man.
Somewhere between the airport and downtown, in the steamy, sinking warren of Bangkok’s broken streets and stinking canals, my taxi driver began complaining. Loudly.
The empty grave changed everything.
“Meet me at Route 2 and Darby Lane by the blue mailbox. I can’t be with my family anymore. I’ll be there waiting for you. Please take me away with you.”
