SIX

Jack had learned the art of origami from a woman he’d lived with in Thailand during the war—from his days in the Corps. She was young, as he was at the time, and sweet and had taught him many things from the Asian art of love to the construction of ornate Buddhist temples in miniature from folded pieces of paper.

The one in front of him at the moment stood more than two feet tall on top of the table. Terraced and decorated like a wedding cake, it had taken him more than two weeks to build. Soaking the paper in the solvent and letting it dry is what consumed most of the time. Still the fact that the temple progressed faster than his writing may have said something about his creative aptitudes, though if it did it was lost on Jack.

The upper six levels were constructed of plain paper, the early discards of his current work in progress, the fourth in a series of now unpublished manuscripts for novels. Maybe he had lost the touch. His last published work was a piece of nonfiction, a technical work for a small publisher in the Southern states: The Ragged Renegades Resource Book. It was more of a pamphlet than a book, an epistle with a little humor added by an editor, on how to home brew your own explosives and incendiary devices. Jack was slipping and he knew it.

The base of the paper temple, the first two levels, was braced on the outside by heavier paper, light card stock with printing and handwritten words evident only on close inspection. The writing gave a unique appearance to the structure, as if the surface had been carved by the midgets who made it in some exotic script. These cards Jack had collected over a period of months.

Sometimes editors didn’t even take the time to type a letter. Instead they hastily scrawled a note, often illegible, on stock printed with their name at the top, each one a variation on the same word: “NO.” They would send these like postcards in the open mails. This practice in particular pissed Jack off, because the postman and anyone else who happened to touch his mail saw them.

He lifted the piece of plywood on which he’d constructed his masterpiece and carried it out the back door to the yard, Jack’s place of special mischief.

He placed the sheet of plywood with the temple on top of an old tree stump sixty feet from the house.

Attached to the straw fuse, which disappeared under one edge of the little temple, he used a twenty-two-caliber rimfire cartridge emptied of its powder as a detonator. Jack replaced the smokeless gunpowder with a carefully prepared solution, chemicals from a hobby shop, and a little black powder packed in around a single filament of fine steel wire. This in turn was connected by a tiny clamp to a length of lead wire that ran to a small battery near the rear of the house.

Years ago he’d been told about this. A common solution for soaking paper. It was said that a newspaper properly prepared and left to dry was virtually undetectable, except by sophisticated Neutron Vapor Analysis not used at most security checkpoints including airports. Carried under the arm with an outer covering of today’s front page, it would look like any other newspaper. Tightly compacted, it would also carry the explosive force of three sticks of dynamite.

He marveled at the things his own government had taught him, survival techniques and ways to wreak havoc, and wondered if this one would work.

There were no neighbors within a quarter mile. The fact that the little paper pagoda had a lot of space for air inside meant the force would be muffled, more of a whoosh than a bang—so that when Jack touched the wire to the battery lead and the force of the explosion threw him against the side of the house and shattered a window over his head, he was for a moment, at least, stunned. A million tiny shards of paper, many of them singed, some still on fire, floated to the ground like golden leaves of autumn.

“Damn. It works.” Jack now knew how he would destroy the airliner, at least on the mythic pages of the manuscript he had not yet started.