Ode to Broken Things Read Free

insertion. They must be strong enough to withstand the pressures that a blood vessel is subject to and yet disintegrate after delivering the drug over a period of time.
    Like Mission Impossible, kan ?
    He worked with a talented team, but no one more talented than Jay Ghosh, the young kid he had recruited. He had known Jay for a lifetime, taught Jay everything, even saved his life once. Unfortunately, Jay had too quickly figured out what was really going on in the lab.
    But, no matter. Jay had been crucial for the breakthrough. Colonel S had almost given up, through the endless animal testing and then the clinical trials in humans, days and months when nothing came close to touching the finger of god. Finally, when it had all come together, it was a vindication of his belief, and he had gone down on his knees.
    He smiled at the memory of Jay shaking his shoulders: “Get up, Prof! We did this, You and I , not some random god!”
    It was a small matter, this matter of belief and disbelief. It was enough that Jay believed in the science that allowed such miracles to happen: A stent filled with drugs could also be filled with superexplosives.
    So easy – this modification, so alike the drugs and the undetectable biomaterial explosives. A breakthrough so similar to the bone structure in the body that it could fool nature. Machines like the mass spectrometers designed to detect the presence of trace quantities of chemicals would not stand a chance.
    Scientists with moral scruples need not apply. Even the money became insignificant when scientists were changing human destiny in a petri dish and, in that respect, he completely agreed with Jay about unfettered scientific genius.
    And soon, the miracle would be in the warrior, who would sit on a wheelchair and glide towards a press conference at this airport. He remembered the crippled young man on the hospital bed in Puchong, while his mother wailed, “We sent you to be an architect! So proud, your father; now what has my son become?”
    He had barely been able to disguise his irritation. The way the family was mourning, anyone would think the young man was dead instead of crippled. The bomb that had blown off the warrior’s legs exploded prematurely at a shopping complex in Jakarta. But the warrior, just out of jail and with no legs, had taken over leadership of the group at a meeting in Puchong in 1999, saying dismissively: “They have castrated us all; what is the loss of a leg?”
    The girl by the window was now pacing. He watched her frown at her reflection in the glass as a middle-aged Malay woman asked her the time. He drew deeply on his smoke, but his hands trembled slightly.
    If the enemy could imprison their brothers and hang their leaders, mocking their martyrs as they stepped into certain death, it was fitting that young men were ready to fight on the side of the righteous. Their people were in Kedah, Jakarta, and many places in Indonesia. The plans were simple: always lie low, hit non-Muslim businesses. They aimed to achieve the Islamic union of Malaysia, Mindanao, and independent Islamic territories in Indonesia.
    The trouble with this country was the bastard politicians. The country needed men who bonded in brotherhood under one God, not the pimps that ran this government now, extending hands of friendship to everyone. The last two months, especially the death of the Tibetan woman, taught him some important lessons.
    Now it was finally his turn. That pimp of a minister would be taken out soon, God willing. The betrayal of this nation was the most unforgivable in the hierarchy of treason, and it was his job to find those treacherous to the rulers, and silence them all. Colonel S had given up too much for this cause, remaining as silent as a watersnake swimming in this muddy river of a country ambushed by whirlpools, to fail at this.
    The girl at the window walked out of an emergency exit, swiping her card on the door. So she was an employee. They must have noticed him