“YOU have to be ready with your hand cameras because action can become very fast. In a matter of three or four minutes, it could all be over, and I may not be able to talk to you again after this.”

Those were the words of former senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. during an interview with Jim Laurie of ABC News in his room at the Grand Hotel in Taipei a day before he was to take the China Airlines jet that would whisk him to Manila for a rendezvous with immortality.