The Impossible Fortune

They show you how to make bombs on the internet. If you know where to look.

What to buy, where to buy it from. How to fit the whole thing together. There are even videos. Men in balaclavas with screwdrivers. Soldering wires on tidy workbenches in breeze-block garages.

They don’t really tell you about the risks. But the risks stand to reason. Be careful with explosives, that doesn’t need to be spelled out to anyone, surely? No one needs to say, ‘Don’t try this at home,’ do they?

There are instructions for big bombs, small bombs, nail bombs, chemical bombs, all the bombs you could ever want to make.

Small to medium was the right choice here. Stable enough to carry around, powerful enough to kill.

In the end the easiest thing to do was go to one of the websites that does all the work for you. Custom-make the bomb to your specifications, deliver it, even help you to place the thing if that’s what you need. This particular company had received very good reviews. They even offered a money-back guarantee if the bomb failed to go off. They’re called ‘Boom or Bust’.

It’s not cheap, when you add up the expertise, the manufacturing costs, the delivery and, most expensive of all, the secrecy of the whole thing. If you want to know the actual cost of a human life, it’s somewhere around twenty-seven thousand pounds. But no tax or VAT. For the obvious reasons.

Worth the extra few quid though. When the bomb finally goes off, money is not going to be an issue, is it?

It’s not all about money, of course. Quite the opposite in some ways.

Okay, then, no time to waste.

Time is ticking, and it’s not the only thing.