Lewis Perdue's Blog, page 7

Among Maya Angelou’s Last Words: Praise For An Overlooked Freedom Summer Book

Among Maya Angelou’s last published writings is a tribute to a new, but mostly overlooked, book that sheds valuable context on Mississippi’s Freedom Summer – on its 50th commemoration.

“The murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner rocked me to the core of my very being,” wrote Angelou in the foreward to My Mantlepiece, a memoir by Carolyn Goodman, whose son was murdered in Mississippi in 1964 along with his two civil rights co-activists.

“I was used to white men killing black men,” Angelou wrote. But I was not used to white men killing white men. …. And I felt for the mothers of the white boys. You see, the mother of a black boy knows that when he leaves in the morning, she may never see him again. But the white mother didn’t know that.”

While My Mantlepiece is ostensibly a posthumous memoir (ably authored by writer Brad Herzog), it provides valuable context for the times and a revealing look at the psychological, cultural and familial reasons why Goodman’s deadly trip to Mississippi half a century ago was almost decided at birth.

What kind of values, what sort of imperatives to do the right thing, how did a deep family respect for social justice and empathy for the underdog make Andrew’s trip to Mississippi so inevitable?

Those are some of the broad contextual revelations this book brings to all who were deeply affected by the Freedom Summer and those who ponder the questions of what makes some good people do evil and why there are others willing to risk their own lives to fight evil.

The answers to those questions are insights into why Maya Angelou and Carolyn Goodman grew so close.

Click  learn more about the book.

“Carolyn Goodman and I liked each other very much. We just admired each other. Beyond that, there was affection. But there was admiration, too, because each knew who the other one was. I knew she was a strong and loving woman. And she knew I was the same….So I liked her and loved her.”

I was 15 years old when Goodman and his friends were killed, but the shock of their deaths changed my life and the way I have lived it.

Before their deaths, Freedom Summer was hardly in my thoughts. I was totally absorbed in my own world:  more concerned with girls, getting my driver’s license and conducting weird science experiments that eventually propelled me to the International Science Fair and my selection as a Westinghouse (Now Intel) Science Talent Search finalist.

After their deaths, a growing compulsion grew that eventually led me to the social justice gateway drug: attending a march.

Then participation.

Eventually I led one. That got me kicked out of the state.

While my own involvement with the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi is far less than it should have been, my actions were still racial and cultural apostasy. This was especially true for someone like me whose family had played a major part of the power structure for more than a century — including a U.S. Senator who was the first to codify Jim Crow segregation when he wrote the Mississippi constitution of 1890.

I have always wondered why they did it — not just Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner — but all of the Freedom Riders, marchers, demonstrators. Why risk it all for someone you never met?

A sense of decency, moral responsibility, the sense that you are your brother and sisters keeper?

But those are just pat answers. Platitudes. More importantly, where’s the fount of those convictions? What forges them into a personal calling that cannot be denied.

Carolyn Goodman’s memoir answered many of those questions for me.

On the surface, the book follows a socially concerned, middle-class, Jewish family in New York. But deeper truth emerges from such minutiae.  Small details gather moral weight and transform themselves into an irresistible force that cannot not be denied, even unto death.

In the hands of a lesser author, those details might be boring. But Herzog writes with a clarity that describes the clear trajectory where each contribution of each small force can be seen in the vitality of the ultimate whole.

Maya Angelou wrote in the foreward that, “People live in direct relation to the heroes and she-roes that they have, always and always….We have to have the people who became famous for what they did. And I think those three are unmitigated heroes, so we have to lift them up and show them to the world.”

If you have even the smallest interest in the Freedom Summer and its consequences, this will add new, never-before-seen context.

 

 

#BringBackOur Girls – Outrage Tunnel Vision?

Outrage is a fickle thing. Yes, the kidnapping of an entire girl’s school is outrageous and wrong. Selling these young girls as brides is nothing less than than pimping for pedophilia.

But long before #BringBackOurGirls made outrage all the current rage, millions of girls — many of them just 11 or 12 years old — were being sold, bartered and traded for the child bride sex trade. Heck, this isn’t even the first time this sort of thing has happened: Kidnapped ‘Virgin-Brides’ Believed To Be Cure For HIV

Click image to enlarge.

Why no global outrage? I made the child bride sex trade a centerpiece of my thriller, Die By Wire. Other parts of that book got raves. But legitimizing the rape of little girls? That part just got yawns, no outrage. Ditto a site I started: Stop Child Brides.

#BringBackOurGirls: A Birmingham Moment?

It’s heartening to see #BringBackOurGirls spark such widespread outrage and awareness. One could hope that this is a Birmingham moment when the U.S. could no longer turn its face away from the evil of American apartheid.

But outrage without action changes nothing. Only action and force make change. Decades of ghastly torture lynchings across the South sparked outrage, but no change. Emmitt Till’s brutal murder outraged, but changed nothing.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s non-violent protests, the Birmingham church bombings, the officially sanctioned murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi outraged. And they finally provoked change. They didn’t cause change. They provoked action which finally did change things.

If You Are Genuinely Outraged, DO Something!

Real change in the United States began when the force of the U.S. federal government moved in to show the Klan, and the Citizen’s Councils and other white supremacists that where were outgunned. Feet on the street pushed back against violence and inequality.

All of the well-intentioned Tweeters behind #BringBackOurGirls must  realize their outrage is symbolic and empty unless it provokes real — meatspace not cyberspace — action.

 Individual Actions Can Start Now

People are not helpless as individuals. Don’t wait for bureaucrats. Don’t wait for politicians and commissions. History shows they act slowly if at all.

Take a good look at the chart above and check out which countries tolerate child brides.

Before you buy that tee shirt, does the tag say “made in Bangladesh?”

Don’t buy it.

Look at other products from those other countries. You can make your outrage count for something more than just gratuitous feel-good symbolism.

Keep on not buying. Tell others not to buy.

Sure, it might cause you some inconvenience.

So, how does your inconvenience stack up against this girl’s: Man Sells Six-Year-Old Daughter As Bride To Settle A Debt

Or this girl: Afghan child bride had escaped torturers but was sent back

Think about it. Read tags. Be an agent of change.

 

 

9-Year-Old Child Brides: Headed For OK In Iraq

Child brides are the worst of abuse all rolled into one beastly, immoral package: pedophilia, child abuse, slavery and the dehumanization of women.

And now this disgusting and unholy practice is heading for legal approval in Iraq in the name of religion.

According to Gordon Brown, United Nations Special Envoy on Global Education:

“It is a descent into barbarism. This month’s plan by Iraqi parliamentarians to legalize girl marriage at nine follows the Pakistan Islamic Council’s demand last month that Pakistan abolish all legal restrictions on child marriage, the revelation that Syrian refugee girls are being sold into marriage against their will and the increased pressure in many African countries to ease the restrictions on selling child brides.”

Read the rest of the statement here: Drive to end child marriage stalls, but fightback begins.

Right now, my thriller Die By Wire is getting a lot of attention these days because of the plot’s similarities to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

But the fight against child brides was the original inspiration for writing it. I created the airliner disappearance plot because I understood that most of the world was run by people who don’t really care about child brides or because they are afraid to speak up for fear of offending Muslims.

But child brides are an offense to Islam and a left-over from the dark ages.

 

 

Stealth Terror: More Frightening, More Profitable

Why would stealth terror be more frightening and more profitable?

From Chapter Fifty of Die By Wire

A dense gauze of cigarette smoke packed the windowless room so tightly the naked white walls seemed to recede toward an unseen horizon.

An unornamented round table barely a meter in diameter rested on gray institutional carpeting, its epicenter hovering precisely over the spot where the absolutely square room’s diagonals intersected.

Khan Nasiri sat at the table in a bare, straight-backed chair, facing the door, facing Mecca.

Years ago, he had scoured the conference room of all distractions and furnished it in a minimally comfortable manner to eliminate every possible thought save those necessary to solve the problems discussed at the table.

Three other men occupied the remaining chairs, all precisely 90 degrees apart aligned with the subtle compass scribes on the table. His council of elders, responsible for Transportation, Finance, and Operations. All shared his blood, and all pledged to him their undying allegiance. Nasiri compensated them well for their unceasing work.

All knew from Nasiri’s previous actions that disloyalty led quickly to death.

Transportation, Finance, and Operations believed in Nasiri’s vision that global domination by a unified worldwide nation of Islam would be brought about by a “Chinese model.”

The Chinese didn’t preach, they didn’t launch violent attacks and yet their exploitation of American lust for material things, corporate greed and criminal mismanagement of public debt by politicians had brought the United States to its knees swifter and more surely than flying a thousand airliners into a thousand buildings ever could.

“The Chinese government owns enough of America’s national debt bonds to instantly ruin them should Washington choose a global course of which Beijing does not approve,” Nasiri said often.

China owned America and they did it without firing a shot or dropping a bomb.

Stealth devastation meant the war was over before the losers ever knew it had started.

Invisible enemies initiated rash, unfocused, counterproductive actions. The unknown assailant invited internal distrust, strengthened the attacker’s position, preserved the assets needed to push on to victory. And the terror of the unknown.

Nasiri gave Finance a nod.

“We’ve had short positions for months now in all relevant stocks,” said Finance. “Our direct hand does not show in the obvious areas — airline and insurance company stocks.

“Such as?” Nasiri said.

“Currency trading positions, bonds, secondary stocks like targeted manufacturing companies and, of course, military contractors and security firms whose business will prosper. So too our closest allies and supporters.”

Nasiri rewarded him with a nod of sage approval.

“The financial rewards will reap billions upon billions of Euros that will help us further our Chinese strategy.”

Nasiri nodded. “Our hawala operation will allow us to buy substantial portions of the U.S. bond portfolio held by the Chinese. Anonymously.”

……

And from Chapter Fifty-Seven

“Why?” Theo asked. “Why worse than 9/11?”

“Because in 9/11, we had something to see,” Mira said. “An enemy to visualize, an adversary to rivet our focus and preventable acts to guard against. But with this? No explosion. No warning. No cause. Just effect.”

Much much more in Die By Wire

My Thriller Predictions – Future Realities Or Channeling Insanity?

The similarities between my 2011 thriller, Die By Wire, and the mystery of Malaysia Airlines 370 is just the latest book of mine where my fictional wanderings end up having future factual realities.(Malaysia Flight 370 – Maybe The Mystery IS The Terror). This has happened with six of my books.

Please understand that I am not saying that terrorists used Die By Wire as a working plan.

However, the facts and technological research underpinning Die By Wire describe do-able, plausible, motivations, methods and opportunities. At the very least, those need to be eliminated if possible.

Where Do These “Predictions” Come From”

I read voraciously … everything digital and dead-tree. Discovery drives me. Everything is an Easter Egg hunt. Something worth knowing is buried in that hoard of unconnected, seemingly trivial things. I like to follow threads from one article or subject to another. Sometimes it seems like I’m accumulating a lot of trivia.

But in the background, my brain has this knack of connecting  a lot of those and … while I m running, backpacking, mountain biking, or just dozing off to sleep, I get one of those “What if?” moments.

All that trivia are like the stones in a Sierra mountain creek, each a step in getting to the other side.

All that has come in handy in my current part-time tasks as a consulting information analyst for one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States. Part of my contribution is the creation of “what if” scenarios.

Die By Wire was one of those types of scenarios that I created before

joining that agency. I’ve been asked not to write any more thrillers

based on such scenarios. That’s probably a good idea.

Six Books With “Predictions”

Like my other scenario-thrillers come true, Die By Wire is fiction based on extensive factual and technological research.

Others include:

Slatewiper, which, in the early 1990s, predicted bio-engineered gene weapons that could target specific ethnic groups. This was a decade before the

International Red Cross warned that they existed.

It was written in 1993 and first sold as a digital book (a Word file) over the Internet in 1995. Publishers rejected it until 2003 because it was deemed too hard to believe.

It may also have been the first ebook sold over the Internet.

The Trinity Implosion (out of print) predicted nuclear terrorism in 1973 when experts said that was too outlandish to consider.

Perfect Killer: Presaged the rise of the pharmaceutically enhanced soldier with no conscience. The early tests may have caused one of the many forms of Gulf War Syndrome.

Zaibatsu, originally published in 1985, predicted the stock market crash of 1987. It included the first mention of hacking an ecommerce connection.

The Tesla Bequest, originally published in 1983, foresaw the government’s secret HAARP operation (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program).

The Wrath of Grapes, Non-Fiction, written in 1997 and originally published in 1998, predicted the massive wine glut of the early 21st century.

The Washington Connection (out of print, 1977). Not quite a prediction, but an embarrassing use of my work. As an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. in the late 1970s, I developed a method of putting shredded documents back together in an expose’ of the Koreagate Congressional bribery scandals.

I was very unhappy when I discovered that the photo section in that book was used by Iranian jihadists to piece together confidential CIA documents seized in the 1978 takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran.

Photo section here: What The Argo Movie Got Wrong About Shredded Documents for details.

My Fictional Predictions, Future Realities Or Channeling Insanity?

The similarities between my 2011 thriller, Die By Wire, and the mystery of Malaysia Airlines 370 is the latest book of mine where my fictional wanderings end up having future factual realities.(Malaysia Flight 370 – Maybe The Mystery IS The Terror)

I am not sure that it is so much imagination, as a knack my brain has with connecting  what I read, see and know … then thinking, “What if?”

That’s come in handy in my current part-time tasks as a consulting information analyst for one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States. Part of my contribution is the creation of “what if” scenarios.

Die By Wire was one of those types of scenarios that I created before

joining that agency. I’ve been asked not to write any more thrillers

based on such scenarios. That’s probably a good idea.

Like my other scenario-thrillers come true, Die By Wire is fiction based on extensive factual and technological research.

Others include:

Slatewiper, which, in the early 1990s, predicted bio-engineered gene weapons that could target specific ethnic groups. This was a decade before the

International Red Cross warned that they existed.

It was written in 1993 and first sold as a digital book (a Word file) over the Internet in 1995. Publishers rejected it until 2003 because it was deemed too hard to believe.

It may also have been the first ebook sold over the Internet.

The Trinity Implosion (out of print) predicted nuclear terrorism in 1973 when experts said that was too outlandish to consider.

Perfect Killer: Presaged the rise of the pharmaceutically enhanced soldier with no conscience. The early tests may have caused one of the many forms of Gulf War Syndrome.

Zaibatsu, originally published in 1985, predicted the stock market crash of 1987. It included the first mention of hacking an ecommerce connection.

The Tesla Bequest, originally published in 1983, foresaw the government’s secret HAARP operation (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program).

The Wrath of Grapes, Non-Fiction, written in 1997 and originally published in 1998, predicted the massive wine glut of the early 21st century.

The Washington Connection (out of print, 1977). Not quite a prediction, but an embarrassing use of my work. As an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. in the late 1970s, I developed a method of putting shredded documents back together in an expose’ of the Koreagate Congressional bribery scandals.

I was very unhappy when I discovered that the photo section in that book was used by Iranian jihadists to piece together confidential CIA documents seized in the 1978 takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran.

Photo section here: What The Argo Movie Got Wrong About Shredded Documents for details.

Malaysia Airlines Flt 370: Charity For Family Support?

I’m looking for guidance on a legitimate charity that supports families of passengers on Malaysia Airlines Flt 370. I’d like to donate my income from all the recent increased sales of my book, Die By Wire.

Why?

Because less than a day after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on March 8, I received emails from people around the world who said they saw an eerie parallel to the plot of my 2011 thriller, Die By Wire, which revolved around airliner disappearances. I also saw sales increase.

I have written a number of thrillers that predicted or resembled events or issues that turned up years later. But this is the first time I have had one connected to people’s actual lives.

I got so many emails about this, that I made a post about that on March 11: Malaysia Flight 370: Here’s How Hacker/Hijackers Can Do It.

That post did not contain a link or an exhortation anywhere to buy Die By Wire because I do not wish to profit from tragedy. So, after one more post, I went silent.

But book sales have continued and I do believe the research I did for the disappearance scenario in the thriller  and the facts it uncovered are important for people to consider: especially the vulnerability of the aircraft’s fly-by-wire computers and the GPS to hackers.

Because some time has elapsed since the event, I feel it’s appropriate to discuss those factual issues. That includes the concept that the mystery could be a new form or terror (Malaysia Flight 370 – Maybe The Mystery IS The Terror).

So, I am going to write about this a lot. And if the sales go up, then that’s all the more charity. All of whatever I get from sales during the rest of this month will go to charity.

So far, however this is the only appropriate charity I can find that seems legit:

Taiwan Buddhist Tzu Chi (Malaysia)


Malaysia Flight MH370: Buddhist Volunteers Aiding Anxious Families in Beijing

Any good advice from readers will be welcome.

 

 

Malaysia Flight 370 – Maybe The Mystery IS The Terror

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is, so far, uncomfortably, uncannily close to the plot of my thriller, Die By Wire.

But a lot of comments have been made about the absence of terrorist “chatter” and claims of responsibility. But maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the mystery IS the terror.

That was the point I made in Die By Wire.

My evil mastermind knew that it’s hard to top 9/11. People get inured … one more hijacking. One more building on fire. Been done. The shock gets absorbed.

Especially so because people push back against someone they can identify, can blame, can hate. Identifying someone to blame offers closure, psychological release where healing can start.

But making aircraft simply disappear gins up fear and distrust. The uncertainty of NO closure can be more painful and last longer than a spectacular blast.

This is the monster under the bed. It’s a primal, visceral fear. And that’s why I chose that for Die By Wire.

My evil mastermind in Die By Wire also knew that this visceral fear and uncertainty could financially cripple airlines. The billions and billions of economic damage done to the Great Satan Crusaders creates real global damage that exceeds a 9/111.

It’s also a great way to make money. My criminal genius in Die By Wire devoted as much time to the financial aspect as to the actual mechanics of making multiple wide-body aircraft disappear. He was a canny old evil fox with the best positions in the debt and equity markets to make money on the disaster. And that makes millions … perhaps billions to fund even more creative terror.

Who was short on Malaysia Airlines stock before the disappearance?

And the pilots do not need to be in on the scam. My bad guys hacked the GPS, signals electronics and crashed the fly-by-wire computers in a very controlled manner.

In reality, civilian GPS is unencrypted and can easily be spoofed by third parties. The fly-by-wire computers are harder, but it has been demonstrated that they can be hacked with an Android phone.

Some links about all that here: Malaysia Flight 370: Here’s How Hacker/Hijackers Can Do It (http://lewisperdue.com/?p=4444).

If something comes along that can shake the foundations of the flying public’s faith in airline safety, then airlines and governments can’t afford to let you know.

That’s why the government was trying to kill DBW’s hero and heroine as they struggled to save the passengers on the multiple aircraft that the villain was going to disappear into the ocean.

Malaysia Flight 370: Here’s How Hacker/Hijackers Can Do It

I’ve been writing about the factual and technological facts that support this possibility since 2011. Below are a number of my posts based on the intensive research that I did for my book, Die By Wire.

Read on to see how hackers could cause the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. As you read, remember two things:

The GPS system used by airlines is insecure, not encrypted. That can be exploited.
There are two kinds of computers: those that have been hacked and those that will be.

Links Explaining How You Can Hack An Aircraft

The Prelude To Fictional (And Real-Life) Aircraft Disappearances: Unencrypted GPS (12/21/11)


Hijacking Airplanes With A Phone: So 3 Years Ago! (04/13/13 )


Why The FAA Is Wrong When It Says Airplanes Are Not Hackable (04/14/13)


Die By Wire’s Fly By Wire GPS Hacking: It’s Real, Bro’ (08/04/13)


Modern Fly-By-Wire Aircraft Could Be Die-By-Wire Death Traps: News Release (12/15/11)

Clearly, it would be easier to bring an aircraft down than to take control of it and fly it.

Onboard hacker/hijackers with a specially equipped laptop could easily have switched off the transponders, then accessed the aircraft’s  fly-by-wire computers and threatened to crash the aircraft unless the pilots agreed to fly a route the hijackers wanted.

Fact-Based Thrillers That Uncover Truths

I conduct intensive research for all my books. While Die By Wire is a fact-based thriller, it is not the first of my thrillers that have been ahead of the curve when it comes to predicting or uncovering actual events.

My first thriller, The Trinity Implosion was dismissed as improbable in 1975 because editors and other “experts” said that terrorists could not possibly build a nuclear bomb.

Likewise, Slatewiper, written in 1995 predicted another improbability that experts poo-pooed: bioengineered gene weapons that can target specific DNA sequences (and, thus, ethnic groups). The International Red Cross now warns that these are real.

Here is a sampling of more examples. You can dismiss aircraft hacking, but I have been right many times.

Expert Says Perfect Killer Exposes A Real Secret Military Program With Horrible Consequences


Pulse Weapons: The Economist Catches Up With My Thriller, Slatewiper


Breast Implant Bombs: My Plots Stay Ahead Of The Curve…Again

 

 

The Heartbreak And Uncertain Reality Of “Brain Dead”

The heartbreak associated with “brain dead” plays out quietly in most cases. But when it periodically plays out in public (“A Brain Is Dead, a Heart Beats On” — NY Times), the tragedy grips us with all the uncertainty and fear of death itself.

The drama peaks in our hearts when we remind ourselves that once upon a not-too-distant time, death was determined when a person stopped breathing. Then it was declared when the heart stopped. And more recently, it has come down to reading brain wave data.

But even that technological step remains tentative with the scientific reality  that we truly can’t yet determine who is going to emerge from a coma.

Heartbreak lives in that uncertainty and thwarts closure.

My novel, Perfect Killer, worked extensively with this in the context of a fact-based thriller. Sandwiched in among the conspiracies and actions, the characters worked with the meanings of consciousness, free will, intentionality and the search for the boundary between sentient and not  … and how that affects our ability to choose right from wrong, good from evil.

And what consciousness means and where it comes from.

The main character in Perfect Killer, Brad Stone is a physician and neurobiology professor at UCLA whose specialty is the study of consciousness. At the top of his priority list are the unknowns involved with his wife, Camilla, who has been in a coma for years.

Here he ponders part of this as he falls asleep:

It struck me then that we can never be who we are because the actual moment of being in the present is an infinitely small moment sandwiched between the constantly shifting memories of who we have been and the thoughts and fantasies of who we will be.

Consciousness perceives events in the world about a fifth of a second after they have actually happened. That means any time we think of the present, we are already looking at the past. The reality we perceive never coincides with the reality that exists.

Who we are is never the same from instant to instant because the present we perceive is continually reshaped by the past. Thus our hopes and dreams for the future propel us through an illusory present to a fourth state of time: our state of being that is simultaneously neither past nor present nor future and yet all of those combined. It had something to do with space-time, which made me wonder if that had anything to do with the soul and where Camilla’s mind lived.

Camilla had no future in this world; no one had ever recovered from her level of profound brain injuries. While she occupied a physical presence in the present that I perceived, her brain showed no indication of consciousness or directed neurological activity above the brain stem, which indicated she lacked a present of her own.

I often worried if an internal life played in her head beyond our scientific ability to detect it. Physicians not so long ago lacked the instruments to detect brain waves, which made me realize that merely because we failed to detect something did not prove its absence.

I fell deeply asleep then, wondering what this meant. And whether it meant any damn thing at all.

Later in the book, Stone visits Camilla’s care facility with Dr, Fowler, her physician.

We entered the door leading into the suite’s sitting room. The Pacific Ocean glowed through the broad windows, showing a top-heavy container ship on the distant horizon heading toward Point Conception. Closer in, I made out the brilliant geometry of a red-and-while sailboat spinnaker and, nearer still, a squad of surfers astride their boards waiting for a good wave.

I followed Flowers to the door leading to Camilla’s room. He opened the door, then turned back to me.

“I’m afraid she also looks worse than last week.” He turned and I followed him into the room.

As always, Camilla’s bed was inclined toward the window. We detected no cognitive control over her eyes, but knowing how much she loved the ocean, I wanted to make sure, if there was any spark in her brain connecting her to this world, she could spend her time as pleasantly as possible.

Research showed we had no way of proving she lacked consciousness, only that we could not detect it.

So I paid for the best DVDs and music and for people to come and read to her. I don’t know whether it did any good for her, but it did a little for me.

When I approached the bed, my heart fell. Camilla had shrunk from the woman I’d visited less than a week before. Her skin trended toward gray and I became acutely aware of the additional IV rack with the antibiotic drip.

“I’m sorry,” Flowers said as he read my face.

I moved to Camilla’s side and held a cool, dry hand so inordinately small in mine. Behind me, the door clicked discreetly as Flowers quietly excused himself.

Camilla’s eyes held steady at the ocean as I held her hand. Then careful not to disturb the network of tubes and monitor leads, I put my head near hers and looked out the window, trying to see what she saw.

I recalled a time when our thoughts and emotions and imaginations synchronized with a rare coherence that kept our two lives utterly in step. I looked away from the ocean and into her eyes. They did not change, did not find my own gaze, did not look away from a distant vision I knew extended beyond any horizon visible to me.

My heart told me she was not aware of me that she was no longer there, that she was no longer Camilla.

But I wasn’t sure.

I bent over and kissed her on the cheek.

“I love you,” I whispered. “I love you.”

Stone returns to these thoughts as he deals with the thriller he has been thrust into.

The Perfect Killer web site elaborates more about this, as well as why I had to wait for my mother to die before I wrote it, why I wrote it, and how much of Stone’s life and family mirrors my own.