The Omega Myth / Asculepios Press (ePub)

A man in his sixties, who likes his sex, his drink, his food, his cigars, and his nude sunbathing (not necessarily in that order!) is approached by two security service agents to help solve an international problem: a bomb has been placed somewhere in the Western world and will go off in eighteen days. It is called the Omega Bomb, or the Omega Cycle, or simply the Omega Machine, and it is a tactical nuclear weapon, capable of flattening a whole city. A drawing of the Omega bomb is enclosed, with a package sent to all Western nations, along with two slips of paper: one contains the threat, another a hint that the solution is "all in the alphabets."

The protagonist, who is cranky, cantankerous, and set in his ways, wrote an essay on alphabets and communications thirty years before, and since the directive is that the answer lies in alphabets, he is called upon, with others, to solve the puzzle, which also defuses the bomb.

The perpetrators are a shadowy bunch of clerics, representing all Western religions (including Judaism and Islam), and their real motive in asking for others to solve the puzzle is to weed out the alphabetic experts in the West who might be able to solve it. These are identified and then targeted by assassins on orders from the clerics.

The story begins in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, moves to the North Country (Cottage Country) when an attack on the protagonist is thwarted, and then on to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, for a debriefing by the head of the security services. There is another attempt on his life there (perhaps enabled by the treachery of the security chief), and they go by train to Montreal and then to Halifax, Nova Scotia, getting off at a town called Truro. He and his security agents (and a technical advisor and one other) go then into eastern Nova Scotia, where they escape notice for a while. They are eventually surrounded by security service agents and the military and brought back to Halifax. After they leave, their cottage hideaway is blown apart by a ship-launched missile.

The action then moves overseas to Majorca, Switzerland and Paris, with the climax coming in Dublin, Ireland. Ten books are used to find the answer to the riddle: the author's own essay called The Dragon's Teeth, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, and his Gutenberg Galaxy, Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato, Edward T. Hall's The Silent Language, Harold Adams Innis's Bias of Communications and his Empire and Communications, Robert Graves's The White Goddess, Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, and James Joyce's s Wake. The books are "decoded" in reverse order, with the biggest revelations coming from the last three. In these are found the means to find the bomb and defuse it, in time, but just in time!