She and FBI Director Robert Mueller would have told President Barack Obama long before Tuesday's security update exactly how to construct the weapon using a liquid igniter, a flammable detonator, and plastic explosive, and more importantly, how to conceal these in a pair of lethal undies.

   It's only a few pages into Chapter 4 of “Master Spies Die Laughing,” published in February of last year, that author Dan Speers not only describes the exploding panties but how a group of passengers help thwart the sabotage. That excerpt has been posted at www.masterspies.com/PantyBomb.html.

   Although the flight in the novel originated from Newark and the terrorist bomb was defused by an on-board U.S. Marshal, there are striking similarities between the fictional story and the Christmas Day attempt by Umar Farouk AbduMutallab to destroy the aircraft. Just as in the actual story, the fictional device failed to fully detonate and set off a fire.

   However, the fictional bomb was smuggled on board by a woman and the resulting fire produced a small explosion that blew the stuffings out one of the rear restrooms.

   Based on events that we now know took place during the last one hundred days of the Bush administration, “Master Spies Dies Laughing” is a send-up of an embattled President, duplicitous agents, clueless spy agencies, half-baked terrorist plots and befuddled bureaucrats desperate to start a war with Iran that they think will save their reputations and put their guy in the White House instead of Obama.

   Although Speers is gaining a reputation for being able to predict the future, or least writing fiction that turns into reality, he says that what he writes is more a matter of inevitability than prophecy.

   In Master Spies, for example, Speers wrote a fictional account of an imaginary conversation in the White House about creating some sort of incident that would trigger a war with Iran. Within months after publication, there were reports that such a conversation actually took in the office of the Vice President, Dick Cheney.

   While this may sound obvious in light of recent revelations about various internal operations of the secretive Bush-Cheney administration, Speers' prophetic account of how Chinese hackers infiltrated the United States computer network anticipated the actual revelations by more than a year.

   Speers also foretells the advent of full-body scanners, sniffers, a new generation of puffers that is just now coming on the market, a still secret method of reading private mail without even opening the envelops, a still undisclosed method of tapping telephone calls, and numerous other espionage technologies. He's even posted a picture of a woman undergoing a full body scan on his website, www.CitizenPoet.com

   Call it chance, but the chain of bizarre coincidences do not end with Speers' foresight on matters of national security. In March of last year, amazon.com in partnership with Publishers Weekly and Penguin Group West named Speers' forthcoming novel, “Boxes Lie Waiting,” as a “Breakthrough Novel of the Year.”

   The mystery novel opens with the discovery of a body in the woods at an actual castle in his New England hometown of Haverhill. Winnekenni Castle is a Medieval-like stone structure crowning a glacial-era hill that overlooks the Merrimack Valley. On the very day of this announcement that was occasioned by a story in his local newspaper, The Haverhill Gazette, a body actually was discovered in the castle woods.

   Spooky? Perhaps, says Speers, “but I've come to expect it. It's like a curse I can't even escape at the end of the year.” Speers says he got a notice from his publisher on December 30 that told him that chance had struck again.

   Although the print edition of Speers' latest book, "Tiger Woods: Ten Ways to Play the Lie," is not due out for another two weeks, his publisher had already released the electronic version, with the Kindle version going live on Amazon.com on December 30. The significance. That was Tiger Woods 34^th birthday.

   “I swear it wasn't planned that way,” Speers said. “I had no idea exactly what the pub date was but it never occurred to me that it would be on Tiger Wood's birthday. It's all about his peccadilloes. Can you imagine what kind of a birthday present that had to have been?”

   Speers claims no special prognosticative abilities other than what he jokingly refers to as his bank account. Others are not so sure, including his wife, Carol. She is currently lobbying him to write a novel about how she wins the lottery.

People, Places and Things:

Author Speers to read at Buttonwoods

HAVERHILL — Visitors will have a chance to meet their favorite local authors face to face at the Local Authors Gathering this weekend at the Haverhill Public Library.

Coordinated by Coralie Hughes Jensen and Chris Obert of Pear Tree Publishing of Bradford, the event will feature writers and their works in genres ranging from poetry to science fiction, and novels to memoirs.

"The gathering is a great place for authors to get to know the public and for them to get to know each other," Obert said.

The goal of the event is to allow the public to meet or become better acquainted with the local writing talent in their community. The authors will also be signing and selling their books to the public.

A similar event was held in December of 2006, Obert said, and the authors had such a great experience they wanted to do it again.

More than 30 authors are scheduled to attend, including Chris Obert, Nancy Obert, Coralie Hughes Jensen, Peter Clenott, John Katsaros, Dan Speers, Mary Marshall, Lucinda Marcoux, William Bond, Marylin Lytle Barr, Nikki Andrews, Michaeline Della Fera, Robert C. Reichert, Julie MacShane, Charles W. Turner, Dan Gagnon, Dave Shaw, Ed Marshall, Patricia Grasso, Anna Soria, Jacqui DeLorenzo, Lenny Cavallaro, Jeanine Malarsky, Elena Dorothy Bowman, Annette Blair, Stephan Anstery, Justin Locke, Lyn Brakeman, Janet Ruth Young, Anne Ipsen, Paul Stone, Hannah Howell, Scott Goudsward, Tracy Carbone, Dave Simms, Judy Seidl, Pat Blodgett, Anita Morales-Swiderski and Julie Gacioch.

By Mike LaBella
mlabella@eagletribune.com