An excerpt of The Cryptos Conundrum, a speculative, time-slip thriller by Chase Brandon (available June 19, 2012).
A fifteen-foot tall steel sculpture sculpture stands in the courtyard of the Central Intelligence Agency building, engraved with a message no one can decipher. One man knows exactly what the statue says. Dr. Jonathan S. Chalmers heads a CIA working group tasked with protecting the greatest secret the U.S. government has ever kept—and planning for its consequences. He alone knows the full story of the threats that face America: threats that have shaped the country’s past, present, and future. If Chalmers can’t save America, nobody can.
Chapter 1
Verdun, France. February 26, 1916
The cordite-clouded sky flashed sparks of primordial fire. And Earth’s anvil shook with concussions that pounded his body and soul as though smithed by Thor’s angry-red hammer. In terrified awe, Dr. Jonathan S. Chalmers, Jr., watched as blinding artillery bursts and dismembering detonations reinforced the enemy’s specter of Death that he felt already overshadowed him.
Cold, wet, wounded, and a lifetime’s distance from his family in New York, Chalmers gripped the steel barrel and bloodstained stock of his 8mm French Lebel, but he would gladly have swapped the rifle for a crystal brandy snifter.
A brilliant mathematician, Chalmers was a scholar and gentleman completely out of his affluent Long Island element. Against reasonable odds or definable logic, he was also a private in the U.S. Army and at present trapped in a gash of dangerous dirt between France and Germany known as the Western Front. Here, a form of human slaughter called trench warfare raged unabated with the rising sun of each new day in a world at war with itself.
[Read the full excerpt of The Cryptos Conundrum by Chase Brandon]