The circus arrives without warning.
Entries by jadewalker
Robert Langdon awoke slowly.
A telephone was ringing in the darkness–a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.
Where the hell am I?
Teddy Daniel’s father had been a fisherman. He lost his boat to the bank in ’31 when Teddy was eleven, spent the rest of his life hiring onto other boats when they had the work, unloading freight along the docks when they didn’t, going long stretches when he was back at the house by ten in the morning, sitting in an armchair, staring at his hands, whispering to himself occasionally, his eyes gone wide and dark.
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.
