Lethal Secrets - Hardcover

Earley, Pete

 
9780765307842: Lethal Secrets
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0765307847 ISBN 13: 9780765307842
Verlag: Forge Books, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

It was thought that during the height of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, the KGB may have cleverly smuggled a nuclear bomb into the very heart of Washington D.C. In Pete Earley's new thriller, Lethal Secrets, this bomb is in the hands of a band of Chechen rebels, lead by an insane terrorist, Movladi 'the Viper' Islamov, who's threatening to detonate it unless his demands are met.
The fate of the city rests in the hands of a disgraced deputy U.S. Marshal, Wyatt Conway, who is reluctantly called into action by his FBI and CIA rivals because he was once a friend of Islamov's, before the freedom fighter turned into an international terrorist.
But to stop Islamov, Conway must trust Vladimir Khrenkov, a possibly corrupt Russian intelligence agent, and Kimberly Lodge, a skeptical CIA beauty. Conway suspects Khrenkov of being the man who executed a top Russian mobster that Conway was protecting in federal witness protection program. And the CIA's Lodge isn't all that certain Conway is capable of outwitting the terrorists and protecting the capital of the free world.
With time running out, Conway must find a way to manipulate and expose Khrenkov, keep Lodge and her bureaucratic cronies off his back, and prevent Islamov from igniting the spark for Armageddon.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Pete Earley is a former Washington Post reporter and winner of the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar for Best Fact Crime Book in 1996 for Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life, and Justice in a Southern Town. His book, which also won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, helped free an innocent man from Alabama's death row. Earley's account of the John Walker spy ring, Family of Spies, was a New York Times bestseller and CBS mini-series. The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison was a national bestseller and was based on a year that Earley spent inside a maximum security federal prison as an author.

Born in Arizona, Earley was reared in Colorado and worked for newspapers in Kansas and Oklahoma before moving to the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C., where he lives with his wife, Patti. They have seven children.

Rezensionen

What could have been an explosive novel of international intrigue exploiting post-9/11 paranoia sparks brilliantly before sputtering out. Deputy U.S. Marshal Wyatt Conway is charged with guarding Sergey Pudin, a Russian mafiosi. Meanwhile, Russian intelligence agent Colonel Khrenkov is blackmailed into murdering Pudin before he can testify against major crime bosses. In distant Chechnya, Movladi "The Viper" Islamov—a former student of Conway's—has become an international terrorist in the Chechen cause, and he's discovered that in the 1950s, the Soviets built a thermonuclear "sleeper bomb" that they secreted in the basement of the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. Conway, a throwback to pre-1950s he-man values, is a devil-may-care smart aleck who confuses prejudice for opinion and wisecracks for wisdom, but he's apparently irresistible to women, especially to Kimberly Lodge, a shapely CIA counterterrorism expert. Undaunted by demotion, Conway shoehorns himself into the CIA's investigative team, making monkeys of the best of the U.S. and Russian officials. Earley knows his stuff—he seamlessly works in complex detail about everything from government bureaucracy to weapons technology—but he undermines his plot with improbabilities and contrivances. Better editing could have made this thriller a blast.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Lethal Secrets
PART I
1
50 YEARS LATER, NEW YORK CITY
 
 
 
"Er, uh, would you like to go for coffee?" he asked, lingering near the door of their college economics classroom.
"Not today," she said. "But maybe some other morning."
She stepped by him into the crowded hallway. He was an American, and although she had lived in Brooklyn for five years, she still felt uncomfortable whenever she socialized with non-Russians. Still, he was handsome and seemed polite. He sat behind her every Tuesday and Thursday morning in the lecture hall. It was an easy class for her. She'd always been good with numbers.
It had taken him several days to screw up his courage. There'd been clumsy attempts. Once, he'd rushed to open the lecture hall door but was too timid to speak. Another time, he'd borrowed a pencil. It was innocent. She was nineteen. He appeared to be about the same.
Perhaps she was making a mistake. What harm would there be in going for coffee? He wasn't a stranger. But her stepfather expected her earlier than usual today. Their restaurant hadn't been open for very long. Her parents and uncle had invested everything in it.
She left the building. The sun felt warm. There were no clouds. Blue sky. It was mid-October and the trees in the park across from the NYU library were dropping their leaves. Despite the sunshine, the air wascrisp. She thought about Moscow. She missed her friends there. She missed her older brother. But she didn't miss the city. It reeked of decay, stagnation, the past. New York was electric. It was her future.
Because she was preoccupied, she didn't notice the U-Haul truck edging up the street behind her as she walked to the subway. But even if she had, it wouldn't have mattered. There was nothing odd about rental trucks in Manhattan. The driver hid behind sunglasses and a navy blue baseball cap with white stitching. New York Yankees.
"That her?" the driver asked.
"Da, da, da," snapped Victor Manakov, the passenger sitting beside him.
The truck eased by the girl and slipped into a no parking zone four car lengths ahead. The driver kept the engine running.
Speaking into his cell phone, Manakov said, "She's the skinny one wearing a white blouse, black pants, carrying textbooks." The description was hardly necessary. The only other people on the sidewalk were a black youngster riding a skateboard and an elderly Hispanic woman walking with the aid of a cane.
Manakov climbed out of the truck's cab. It's rear cargo door jerked upward. Three men crawled out. Each was wearing blue overalls. They appeared to be moving men about to deliver furniture.
"Olga! Can that be you?" Manakov exclaimed in Russian.
She stopped, examined his face, but didn't recognize him.
Stepping closer, he said, "I'm a friend of your brother, Vladimir! We were fighters together in Afghanistan!"
The other men quietly encircled her, yet she didn't sense any danger. She was trying to match his face to a memory. He opened his arms, as if he were about to embrace her. That's when the others sprang into action.
One grabbed her left arm, the other her right, while the third reached around her waist and easily lifted her from the sidewalk. Manakov snatched her legs. Caught completely by surprise, she dropped her books and tried to struggle. But her reaction came too late. They tossed her into the truck. The door slammed down. The vehicle lurched from the curb.
"Shut up! Bitch!" Manakov yelled. He slapped her hard across the cheek. Olga was shoved onto her chest. Her hands and feet were pushed together and bound with gray duct tape. A torn strip was slapped across her lips. It all happened in a matter of seconds. One moment she had been recalling Moscow and daydreaming about the friendly American boy in her class. Now she was being abducted in the darkened rear of a rental truck.
Why?
Her body began to tremble. She couldn't control the shaking. Her face burned.
How had they known her brother's name? What did they want?
Most of all: Why me?
Copyright © 2005 by Pete Earley

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Verlag
Forge Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0765307847
ISBN 13 
9780765307842
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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