Says Holm:
“Mark was very proud of being a gay man, [but] it
wasn’t the first thing he would define himself
as.”

But whether Mark
intended it to be or not, 2001 was turning out to be a
transitional year for him in many ways, including the way in
which he integrated his sexual orientation with the
rest of his life.

“The two
things in his life that he thought would never come
together, did,” Mickle says, referring to
Mark’s E-mail to the team. “When they
fused, it was like a lightbulb going off in his
head.”

After his
six-year relationship with Holm ended in 1999, Mark was for
the first time socializing as a single and openly gay
man. And, along with Eberhart and other new friends
from the Fog, he liked to mix it up while going out on
the town—maybe stopping by a straight club before
hitting a gay bar, such as the Lone Star Saloon, which
uses the slogan “Bears, Bikers, and
Mayhem!”

“If we
were going to do some sort of nasty shot in a bar and no one
wanted to do it, Mark was always the first one to give it a
try,” Eberhart says. “He would be the
one to eat the worm.”

Mickle says Mark
was not “straight-acting,” as some people have
suggested since September 11. “He was just
acting like Mark. Sure, your gaydar would hit 0 every
time [you saw him], but you would be so wrong.”

Things were
changing at work as well. Business was so good when Mark
opened his firm that he was basically able to pick and
choose what clients he wanted to work with, says
Peer-Olaf Richter, an account executive who started
working for Mark in January 2001. But by that summer
the bottom had fallen out of the technology market, and the
Bingham Group’s roster had fallen from six full-time
clients to two. That was incredibly hard for Mark.

“I learned
very early on that he was really good at making immediate
contact, chitchat, and building bridges between
people,” Richter says. “Then, when the
industry turned sour and it got to be much more about
hard facts, I don’t think he really enjoyed the
profession. Essentially, everything he had built up in
that short amount of time had basically crumbled and
fallen to pieces.”

Mark, a man who
friends say hated to lose at anything, started to spend
less time at his San Francisco office. He also was
considering relocating full-time to New York City,
where he already was living part-time and had opened a
satellite office in the Chelsea apartment he shared with
Amanda Mark.

And, Richter
says, while he and his colleagues were in the office
worrying about the loss of clients and the shrinking
budgets, Mark was checking in from Hawaii, Las Vegas,
Monaco, or Pamplona, Spain—where he took his
now-infamous run with the bulls. “At the time, we
were sitting in the office saying to ourselves,
‘What is that man doing?’ ” Richter
says.

Hoglan
acknowledges that her son was a “wild and
unpredictable boss” at times. She also concedes
that there were times that as a mother she wanted to
urge him to settle down. “He spent a lot of money,
goofed off with his friends, worked like a dog, and
lived the life that I have always dreamed of,”
she says. “And now I’m just really glad that
he did.”

Mark spent Monday
night, September 10, at Matt Hall’s home in Denville,
N.J., where the two men ate ice cream, watched Monday Night
Football, and then chatted while Mark trimmed his
goatee in front of the bathroom mirror.

The two met on
America Online in June, and after several dates they spent
a week together in early September at the Southern Decadence
festival in New Orleans. A shy guy who says he
“never made the first move,” Hall was
amazed with the confidence Mark exuded. “He took me
by the hand in front of the Phoenix bar and said,
‘Let’s go meet people,’ ” Hall
says. “Then he started going up to people and
saying, ‘Hi, I’m Mark Bingham from
California. This is Matt from New Jersey.’ ”

Their time
together had been romantic, but Hall says they had an
understanding that they were to be “just
friends.” Nevertheless, that Monday night in
Denville, Mark turned to Hall and asked, “When do we
talk about making this relationship more
exclusive?”

“I just
looked at him and said, ‘You need to be on this coast
full-time,’ ” Hall says, admitting that
even though Mark’s question took him by
surprise, he was excited about the possibility of a more
serious relationship with him.

The tension from
Mark’s question hung over the men well into the next
morning, and by 7 a.m., when they were racing toward Newark
airport, it was heightened by the stressful
possibility that Mark was going to miss his flight
home to San Francisco. He ended up being the last to board
the plane, getting to his seat so late that he had
only enough time to make a quick mobile phone call to
Hall before turning off “all electronic
devices,” as the flight attendants were instructing.

“He called
me at 7:49 a.m. and said, ‘Hi, thanks for driving so
crazy to get me here. I’ve made the plane,
I’m sitting in first class, and I’m
drinking a glass of orange juice,’ ” Hall
says. “I said, ‘OK, have a good trip.
Give me a call when you get there.’ I never told him
how much I loved him,” Hall adds. “With
Mark, you were always going to see him again. You were
always going to talk with him again.”

Nobody knows for
sure what Mark did those two hours after he hung up with
Matt Hall. One can imagine that he ate a first-class
breakfast, rummaged through the newspaper for the
latest on the Dolphins, who were scheduled to play the
Buffalo Bills that weekend, and reached across the aisle to
introduce himself to his fellow passengers.

We do know that
at 9:44 a.m. Eastern time, he called his mom. “Hi,
Mom, this is Mark Bingham,” he said when she
picked up the phone. “I just wanted to say that
I love you. I am on a flight from Newark to San
Francisco, and there are three guys on board who’ve
taken over the plane, and they say they have a
bomb.” It’s the minutes after that call to his
mother, those between when the hijackers took control of the
plane and when it crashed in Pennsylvania, that have
everyone really guessing.

Todd Sarner says
that one of the most frustrating things he’s
experienced since September 11 has been knowing
“more than anything I’ve known in my
life” that Mark was involved in taking the plane
down—but then not knowing how to adequately
explain how he knows.

“I keep
having this image from watching Mark play rugby a couple of
years ago,” he adds. “His team had just
kicked the ball, and there were probably 15 people
between Mark and the guy who caught it. And I just
remember watching Mark do something I’ve seen him do
a thousand times—duck down his head and go
through the crowd fearlessly, like he wasn’t
even there, and then tackle that guy.”

Did Mark Bingham
help tackle the terrorists on September 11?
Investigators will be combing through the wreckage of Flight
93 and listening to the cockpit voice recorder for
months and maybe years to find out. But the people who
knew Mark and watched him live his life say they have
all the proof they need.