Foreign Influence: A Thriller - Softcover

Six years ago: A CIA paramilitary team deployed to Italy snatches radical Islamic cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr also known as Abu Omar off the streets of Milan as he is heading toward his mosque for evening prayers.

Though all highly trained operatives, the paramilitary team leaves a trail of electronic and paper breadcrumbs. As a result, and despite an alleged tacit agreement between the CIA and its Italian counterpart, SISMI, twenty-six American embassy and CIA personnel are indicted by an Italian magistrate.

The CIA and SISMI deny any knowledge of the operation and the twenty-six Americans are tried in absentia and are cautioned by the United States Government to never enter the European Union again.

Three years later: Italian SISMI intelligence agent, Nicola Calipari has just rescued a kidnapped Italian journalist in Baghdad, Iraq. As they speed toward the airport, they refuse to yield at a checkpoint and are fired upon by American troops. Calipari shields the journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, and is shot to death. Sgrena, a reporter for the
communist paper Il Manifesto claims the attack was deliberate and that she was the target.

The two above stories are true.

Present day: As a group of American college students studying art history in Italy for the summer prepare to board a motor coach outside their hotel in Rome, no one notices that an extra suitcase has been placed among their bags in the lobby.

Listening to their iPods, texting friends back in the States, and making plans for what they will do when they arrive in Florence, they take one final look at the Coliseum as they pass. It is at that moment that the bomb concealed within the suitcase in the belly of their bus is detonated.

A group affiliated with Abu Omar takes credit. They announce that the attack is in retaliation for America s kidnapping of Omar and that they have other attacks planned on Americans and American interests across Europe. America s new president (having succeeded Robert Alden from The Apostle) brings Scot Harvath back inside the inner sanctum of the Oval Office and puts him on the case, but there s a catch. The new president doesn t like
Harvath's cowboy reputation and decides to assign a babysitter to him a bitter, washed up CIA case officer who has been parked at Langley for the last fifteen years due to a very deadly mistake.

The assignment is simple - hunt down whoever was behind the attack and punish them so severely that not only will they not be able to carry out any further attacks, but terrorists around the world will think twice before ever attacking American citizens again.

After a disastrous meeting in Rome with the hostile Giuliana Sgrena of Il Manifesto, Harvath is approached by a beautiful Italian woman with a message. The attacks are only a prelude; a feint to draw the United States off guard and divert its attention from the chaos that will soon be unleashed. That information will lead Harvath back into partnership with an old adversary (the Troll) and a blood-soaked race through Italy and across Europe as they try to prevent one of the most audacious and unthinkable acts of war in the history of mankind.

Brad Thor, a graduate of the University of Southern California, has served as a member of the Department of Homeland Security s Analytic Red Cell Program and is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Lucerne, Path of the Assassin, State of the Union, Blowback, Takedown, The First Commandment, The Last Patriot,
and The Apostle.