Burn Notice - 01 - The Fix by Tod Goldberg

Author:Tod Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Thriller
Published: 2010-12-16T23:00:00+00:00

7

If you're at home and don't have access to the bomb squad, the best way to open an envelopethat you think might contain an explosive charge is to not open it at all. Throw it in a tub filled with water or stick it in your toilet. Within two or three minutes, you'll be able to see precisely what is inside of the envelope.

If you see wires, a stick of TNT, hundreds of ball bearings, nails, a blasting cap, the odds are someone wants to kill you.

Don't open your letter.

If on the off chance the person you think wants to kill you was smart enough to send you a bomb in a waterproof, plastic-lined cardboard mailer, and you still have a latent desire to know for sure if someone wants you dead or disfigured, all you need is a piece of wire and some string, strong nerves, and a few yards of space between you and the envelope.

People who build letter bombs are big on bangs, particularly if they happen to be in the vicinity of the person opening the letter. The sound of the explosion, the flying limbs, the burned corpses, that's their thing. That means they leave the creativity to the bomb itself. The trigger is an afterthought. 80 percent of letter bombs are activated by opening the top flap of the envelope. 15 percent go off when the materials are removed. 5 percent never go off at all, because if you send someone a letter bomb, you're crazy and crazy people sometimes forget important steps in the building of bombs.

Ex-KGB? Not so much. So, as I stood in my mother's bathroom and stared at a wet plastic-lined cardboard mailer that revealed only that the persons who dropped off this package for me knew the same things I did, Fiona stripped apart a length of coaxial cable until she had a span of sharp wire about a foot long. She carefully inserted the cable through the bottom of the envelope and then threaded it back out and looped it around a piece of yarn that my mother swore she couldn't part with, since she intended to use it to knit me a winter scarf, but which I told her I'd replace with a whole ball of yarn if I accidently blew up her bathroom.

I then placed a frying pan on one end of the envelope, fastening it in place on the bathroom floor.

Fiona and I backed slowly out of the bathroom, keeping the yarn slack as we walked down the hall, back toward the kitchen, where the smell of pot roast still hung in the air an hour after we'd eaten.

My mom walked up with a cigarette in her mouth, lighter at the ready. "Be careful, Michael. I just redid that bathroom," she said.

"That was in 1996," I said. "And if you like the way it looks, you'll maybe keep the open flame away."

"I've been smoking all day and nothing happened," she said. "I don't know when you decided you had all the answers, anyway.

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