In my line of work, training is great, but nothing beats experience. As the two SUVs careened toward me, my experience in shitholes the world over allowed me to process several things at once: One, my Glock’s slide had locked to the rear, revealing an empty chamber. Two, my spare magazine was in the truck’s…
Chapter 4 That evening, Stoker amused himself with the earl’s latest purchase for the Rosemorran Collection—an enormous walrus that had required the combined strength of numerous porters to wheel into the Belvedere, the freestanding ballroom that had been given over to the various artifacts and works of art hoarded by seven generations of earls. It…
Prologue State of Bavaria, Germany Saturday, June 8 10:40 a.m. Danny Daniels liked the freedom of not being president of the United States. Make no mistake, he’d loved being president. And for eight years he’d performed the job to the best of his ability. But he really cherished his life as it was now. Able…
Chapter 1 The hill is steep here, and there is no guardrail above the river. I think I am being careful, keeping a light touch on the wheel, feathering the brakes. But then I come around the curve and see the spiked objects scattered across the asphalt in my headlights. They look like barbaric…
CHAPTER ONE The little purple Christmas tree had a lot to answer for. Con hadn’t celebrated Christmas in the three years she’d lived in Washington DC. Hadn’t meant to this year either. But then on the way home from the corner store, she noticed the tree in a box of junk left on the sidewalk…
CHAPTER 7 SARAH KELLER Agent Keller slid the key into the door of the small ranch-style house, moths circling the porch light above her. Readington, New Jersey, wasn’t a fancy neighborhood, which was just as well. That would’ve been cost prohibitive, given her FBI salary. But it was safe, filled with working-class families and young…
ONE London November 1667 The north-western road to St Giles-in-the-Fields was darker and more desolate than Lucy Campion remembered. She shifted her peddler’s pack, full of True Accounts and Strange News, her shoulders aching under the familiar strain. She’d taken the longer path to avoid the outskirts of Covent Garden since it still teemed with…
SATURDAY Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are “poor and blank.” This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for changes, the desire for action, and the desire for revolution. On a blank…
Prologue 18 June 1933 Outside, the horizon had been lost to the darkness, with sky and sea both black as the underside of a dead man’s eyelids. No stars shone and the moon was hidden behind the clouds. Only the white foam that curled away from the sides of the ocean liner revealed movement,…
Chapter 1 As we hitch our horses to a lodgepole pine, shouts and laughter float over on the night breeze. Teen agers partying in the forest. At their age, I’d longed to be invited to a party like the one we hear. I didn’t yearn for the beer kegs or the drug buffet or the…
