A Good Book but a Strange Read

I have been doing very little stitching these past four days since I have been absorbed in a lengthy novel by Nelson DeMille, The Lion Game.  As a New Yorker, who lost friends and neighbors in the Twin Tower disaster on 9/11/01, this was a strange experience.  I will be forever grateful that my youngest son's summer job, which placed him within a block of the disaster, ended two weeks before 9/11.  Otherwise, he would have been coming out of the subway onto that very street at the time of  the collapse.  The novel, published in 2000, dealt with Mideastern terrorists and made frequent reference to the then standing towers.

The novel was fascinating but reading it took on something of a Twilight Zone atmosphere because I knew what came next in the real world.  Cynical soul that I am, I fear that in the real world of anti-terrorism agencies, there is even less cooperation and even more territorialism than the book depicts.  In the book, turf wars seem to take precedence over human lives with the predictable result of even more lives lost.  I suspect if the average citizen really knew what went on behind the closed doors of the CIA, the FBI and Homeland Security, we'd all be appalled at the flaws in the system meant to protect us and amazed at our sheer dumb luck in not having suffered even more at the hands of terrorists.