| In the waning days of 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 took off from London, bound for New York, loaded with two hundred and fifty-nine passengers and a hidden bomb onboard. As the plane passed over Lockerbie, Scotland, the explosive detonated with such force that the plane blew apart, scattering wreckage across almost nine hundred square miles. Everyone on the flight died; debris caused the deaths of eleven more people on the ground. Investigators later concluded that many passengers remained alive during their six-mile fall. Nearly thirty years later, the brother of one of the victims was still investigating the disaster. A sophomore in college when his older sibling, David, was killed, Ken Dornstein had spent much of the intervening period trying to track down the conspirators, as Patrick Radden Keefe detailed in 2015. Suspicions had long centered on terrorists from Libya; Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the bombing, was released by Scotland, in 2009, despite outraged objections from American officials. (The authorities had been led to believe that he would soon die of cancer; he didn’t, and received a hero’s welcome upon his return to Libya.) Dornstein, a journalist and filmmaker who had once worked at a detective agency, eventually focussed his efforts on identifying the bombmaker, a search that would be influenced by the toppling of Muammar Qaddafi, the purported regrets of a fellow-terrorist, and the discovery of files originally assembled by the East German secret police. Among colleagues and loved ones, Dornstein’s doggedness generated sympathy, but also concern. “I figured he was either completely insane,” a work associate remembered, “or pretty much right.” | 
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