AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

The bomb aboard the number nine tram claimed seventeen

lives. Sixteen were passengers.

The seventeenth was the driver of a nearby postal truck.

Mail from his shattered vehicle littered the cobblestones in

front of the Museum of the Tropics and fluttered, like tiny

flags, from the branches of the linden trees.

An hour later, in a shaky VHS video delivered to the studios

of Al Jazeera in Dakar, a masked man, posing in front of

a green banner, took responsibility for the outrage. A group

calling themselves Justice for Islam, he said, had acted “in

reprisal for Dutch support of the American crusaders’ continuing

occupation of Iraq.” The Dutch had withdrawn their last

troops from Iraq long since, but that was something the terrorists

chose to overlook.

The incident took place on a glorious April day, chilly but

without the usual breeze. The absence of wind ensured that

much of the scattered mail stayed in the area of the blast instead

of littering the neighboring streets and being blown into

canals.

As soon as the authorities liberated the area around the

truck, postal employees moved in and gathered up what they

could. The salvaged mail was stuffed into canvas sacks and

carried away to the Central Post Office on the Oosterdokskade,

where a team under the leadership of Postal Inspector Marnix

Gans started sorting it.

Some of the letters and packages were relatively undamaged.

These were immediately fed back into the system and sent on

their way. Some pieces had suffered the effects of the explosion,

the resulting fire, and the water that had been used to put the

fire out. Wherever addresses were still legible, tape was used for

repairs and that mail, too, was sent on its way. Finally, Gans’s

team got down to the hard part: trying to piece together fragments

and subjecting charred remnants to ultraviolet and

infrared lights in an attempt to decipher addresses unreadable

to the naked eye.

A few of the mystery envelopes had the same characteristics.

They were square, made of a manila paper almost as

strong as cardboard and lined with a protective plastic permeated

with tiny bubbles. One of them had been torn open

by the explosion. It contained a digital video disk. The DVD

itself was neither damaged nor labeled. There was nothing

else inside the envelope.

Excerpt ends.