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actually at Rat when the paper’s editor, Jeff Shero, slit open the envelope and read it.
    “Far fuckin’ out!” he yelped.
     • • • 
    For their next bombing, a group of their friends pitched in. On September 18, 1969, as President Nixon delivered a speech at the United Nations, two miles north, Alpert and the others gathered around Melville as he assembled a bomb. He used fifteen sticks of dynamite, a blasting cap, and a Westclox alarm clock. When he finished, he lowered the device into a handbag Janehad stolen. Wearing a white A-line dress and kid gloves, she slid the bag’s strap over her shoulder, gave the group a salute, and left. She took the bus downtown, cushioning the bag on her lap, and got off at Foley Square, home to the U.S. Courthouse, with its vast, colonnaded façade; the New York County Courthouse; and Alpert’s destination: the two-year-old Federal Building, a forty-two-story rectangle of glass and steel. At the elevator bank, Alpert pressed the button for the fortieth floor. Reaching it, she stepped into an empty hallway. She left the bomb in an electrical-equipment closet.
    Around 1 a.m. the conspirators gathered on the roof of an apartment house in the East Village. They had trained a telescope on the upper floors of the Federal Building. All the skyscraper’s lights remained ablaze. High atop the building, an airplane beacon blinked its orange eye. They waited, taking turns at the telescope. The minutes ticked by like hours. Then, suddenly, a few minutes before two, every light in the Federal Building silently winked out.
    “Holy shit,” someone breathed.
    “An explosion of undetermined origin,” the Times called it the next morning, by which time Melville had already learned they had bombed not the Army Department, as planned, but an office suite belonging to the Department of Commerce. The blast had blown a six-foot hole in a wall and a twenty-five-by-forty-foot hole in the ceiling, mangling furniture and file cabinets on the floor above. No one had been injured.
    A few days later Alpert was walking into the Rat offices when she saw police cruisers outside. She stopped at a pay phone and called in. An editor said the cops wanted the Marine Midland communiqué. Alpert killed time in a diner before returning. The cops were gone. But she knew that she and her friends had been sloppy. Too many people were too chatty. Still, she allowed herself to relax when Melville left for a radical gathering in North Dakota.
    Melville was still away when some of the others, led by a young militant named Jim Duncan, decided they wanted to bomb something, too. * Duncan targeted the Selective Service induction center on Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan, the building where every man of age in the borough had to register for the draft. On the night of October 7, Duncan left his bomb in a fifth-floor bathroom. When it detonated, at 11:20 p.m., the explosion wrecked the entire floor, scattering debris throughout the building and blowing out windows. No one was injured. The communiqué, which Duncan wrote himself, was mailed to media outlets across the city. It said the bombing was in support of the North Vietnamese, “legalized marijuana, love, Cuba, legalized abortion and all the American revolutionaries and G.I.’s who are winning the war against the Pentagon [and] Nixon. [S]urrender now.” The reaction at Rat , and among everyone they knew in the Movement, was joyful.
    Afterward, Jane and the others planned their most ambitious attack to date: a triple bombing, aimed squarely at centers of American corporate power. They planned to strike on Monday, November 10, 1969. The day before, Melville returned, having run out of money; once he got some, he said, he was going back to North Dakota. He spent the day talking with his pal George Demmerle of the Crazies, excitedly telling him everything. The two agreed to bomb something together that week. Jane was beside herself. None of them much cared for