The End Game (Brit in the FBI, 3, Band 3) - Hardcover

Coulter, Catherine; Ellison, J. T.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399173803 ISBN 13: 9780399173806

Verlag: PENGUIN GROUP, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

From #1 New York Times–bestselling author Catherine Coulter, the explosive new addition to the remarkable thriller series featuring Nicholas Drummond and Mike Caine.
 
FBI agent Nicholas Drummond and his partner, Mike Caine, are deep into an investigation of COE—Celebrants of the Earth—a violent group known for widespread bombings of power grids and oil refineries across the country. While investigating a tip from a civilian who’s overheard about a possible bombing plot, the Bayway Refinery in New Jersey explodes. Nicholas and Mike race to the scene and barely escape being killed by a secondary device.
 
Returning to the civilian’s home to continue their interrogation, they discover the tipster—and the FBI team left to guard him—dead. While Nicholas calls in the assassinations, COE strikes again, this time launching a cyber-attack on several major oil companies and draining their financial and intellectual assets.
 
But COE has been infiltrated by a deep-cover counterterrorism agent named Vanessa Grace. A bomb-making expert, Vanessa must leave COE and join forces with Nicholas and Mike to stop the organization’s devious plan to assassinate the President. But there’s an assassin on the loose who could tip the scales in COE’s favor, and no one knows his ultimate target, or who has contracted his services.
 
Working with the CIA, the Secret Service, Mossad, MI-5, and even Savich and Sherlock, Nicholas and his team put their lives on the line to prevent another conflagration—and save the President.

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Catherine Coulter is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the FBI Thrillers featuring husband and wife team Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock. She is also the author—with J. T. Ellison—of the Brit in the FBI series. She lives in Sausalito, California.

J. T. Ellison is the bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, including What Lies Behind and When Shadows Fall, and her work has been published in more than twenty countries. Her novel The Cold Room won the ITW Thriller Award for Best Paperback Original and Where All the Dead Lie was a RITA® Nominee for Best Romantic Suspense. She is also coauthor of the Brit in the FBI series, including the New York Times bestsellers The End Game, The Lost Key, and The Final Cut.

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Also by Catherine Coulter

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

 

Prologue

1: Knight to F3

Monday: 11 p.m.–4 a.m.

2: Knight to F6

3: Pawn to C4

4: Pawn to G6

5: Knight to C3

6: Bishop to G7

7: Pawn to D4

8: Castles

9: Bishop to F4

10: Pawn to D5

11: Queen to B3

12: Pawn takes C4

13: Queen takes C4

14: Pawn to C6

15: Pawn to E4

16: Knight on B to D7

17: Rook to D1

18: Knight to B6

19: Queen to C5

20: Bishop to G4

21: Bishop to G5

22: Knight to A4

23: Queen to A3

Tuesday: 7 a.m.–2 p.m.

24: Knight takes C3

25: Pawn takes C3

26: Knight takes E4

27: Bishop takes E7

28: Queen to B6

29: Bishop to C4

30: Knight takes C3

31: Bishop to C5

32: Rook on F to E8 CHECK

33: King to F1

34: Bishop to E6

35: Bishop takes B6

36: Bishop takes C4 CHECK

37: King to G1

38: Knight to E2 CHECK

39: King to F1

40: Knight takes D4 CHECK

41: King to G1

42: Knight to E2 CHECK

43: King to F1

44: Knight to C3 CHECK

45: King to G1

46: Pawn takes B6

47: Queen to B4

48: Rook to A4

Tuesday: 2 p.m.–6 p.m.

49: Queen takes B6

50: Knight takes D1

51: Pawn to H3

52: Rook takes A2

53: King to H2

54: Knight takes F2

55: Rook to E1

56: Rook takes E1

Tuesday: 6 p.m.–Midnight

57: Queen to D8 CHECK

58: Bishop to F8

59: Knight takes E1

60: Bishop to D5

61: Knight to F3

62: Knight to E4

63: Queen to B8

64: Pawn to B5

Wednesday: 6 a.m.–Noon

65: Pawn to H4

66: Pawn to H5

67: Knight to E5

68: King to G7

69: King to G1

Wednesday: Noon–4 p.m.

70: Bishop to C5 CHECK

71: King to F1

72: Knight to G3 CHECK

73: King to E1

74: Bishop to B4 CHECK

Wednesday: 4 p.m.–Midnight

75: King to D1

76: Bishop to B3 CHECK

77: King to C1

78: Knight to E2 CHECK

79: King to B1

80: Knight to C3 CHECK

81: King to C1

Friday: 8 a.m.

82: Rook to C2 CHECKMATE

 

Epilogue

Author’s Note

United States–Mexico Border

Three Months Ago

Zahir Damari watched the coyote turn to face the ragged band of Hondurans on the sloping Texas side of the Rio Grande. As the last Honduran climbed up the bank, pulled up by his father, Zahir saw hope now dawning on the dirty faces, saw the relief in their tired eyes at surviving the nightmare trip. They’d made it; they were in America.

The coyote, Miguel Gonzales, eyed them with contempt—nothing new in that, he’d treated this group with unveiled scorn since the beginning of their trek eight days before. Gonzales stuck out his hand to the leader of the group, an older man, a father of two younger sons. He waggled his fingers.

“Pagenme porque ustedes son unos miserables.”

He wanted the other half of the money owed. No, the thieving scum wanted more. Gonzales had upped the payoff. Zahir saw the Hondurans’ shock, their fear, saw them talking among themselves, voices rising.

Gonzales pulled a pistol, aimed it at the group, and held out his hand again.

Zahir smiled at Miguel Gonzales, a brutal man with stained teeth and black eyes that reflected Hell. He walked up to him, his hand outstretched with bills, and as the coyote grabbed them, Zahir stepped in quickly and gently slipped his stiletto into Gonzales’s filthy shirt. Gonzales didn’t make a sound because Zahir’s knife was always true. It slid under the breastbone, directly into the coyote’s heart. Gonzales simply looked up into Zahir’s face, dropped the pistol, fell on his side, and died in a mess of dry shrubs.

The Hondurans were frozen in place, too terrified and shocked to move. Zahir leaned down, pulled out his stiletto, cleaned it on Miguel’s filthy jeans. He calmly went through Miguel’s pockets, pulled out a big wad of bills, handed them to the young woman closest to him, and smiled.

“Buena suerte”—good luck—and he gave them a salute and walked away, toward El Paso, only three miles to the north.

The day was brutally hot, but he didn’t mind since he’d been raised in the worst desert heat imaginable.

In his shirt pocket was a small notebook filled with information and strategy from Hezbollah’s top enforcer, Hasan Hadawi, the Hammer, about a brilliant young scientist named Matthew Spenser, and how Zahir could use him to help him cut off two heads of the hydra. It made Zahir’s heart speed up to think about the actual doing of it, the awesome pleasure that would course through him when he’d succeeded.

Zahir knew most of the intel and strategy was from Hadawi’s Iranian master, Colonel Vahid Rahbar, openly committed to the obliteration of anyone who wasn’t a Shia, which would leave a small world population indeed.

Zahir knew Spenser and his small group were hiding near Lake Tahoe. Spenser, according to the Hammer, had gone off the rails years before when his family had been killed in London’s terrorist subway bombing in 2005. Now he led a small group called Celebrants of Earth, or COE, their goal to eliminate oil imports from the Middle East, but no murder, no casualties. The idiot ideologues. Until recently, Zahir knew the group had operated in Britain and Europe, blowing up only mid-sized oil refineries, small crap. But now they were here, in America, their message to the media after each bombing always the same:

No more oil from terrorist countries or you will pay the price.

Both the Colonel and the Hammer believed Spenser was an unsophisticated anti-Muslim zealot, and ripe for manipulation. Over the Hammer’s favorite gin and countless French Gauloises, he’d told Zahir to become Matthew Spenser’s best friend, his mentor, a man he would come to trust implicitly, a man he would follow. “You will gently mold and manipulate this fool’s penny-ante goals until they become your glorious ones”—that is, until Spenser became a murderer. Zahir knew it would be a challenge, but one he would win. He knew he wasn’t as smart as Spenser in science, but he was years beyond Spenser in strategy, planning, execution, and sheer balls. But unlike the bare-fisted Hammer, Zahir was never guilty of underestimating an opponent, or reducing him to faults and weaknesses and strengths. He knew when to use a hammer, when to use a simple lie.

It was over the Hammer’s fourth gin that he’d told Zahir with a snicker that Spenser might have a possible weakness—a woman named Vanessa, a beauty, late twenties, red hair, milk-white skin, and blue eyes, and the Hammer showed him a photo of her. She hardly fit the image of a wacko bomber, but the Hammer assured him she’d been building bombs with an Irish IRA git named Ian McGuire and his faction. Both groups hated what they saw as radical Islam’s encroachment into their world, and according to the Hammer, this common cause united them.

With another snicker, he told Zahir the woman and Spenser were probably lovers and his grin split his mouth wide enough to see the gold filling in his back molar. He suggested Zahir seduce Vanessa away from Spenser, but Zahir couldn’t figure out what that would gain him, certainly not Spenser’s trust and friendship. He would see.

But it was Iranian colonel Vahid Rahbar who’d told him his most important goal: to steal...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PENGUIN GROUP
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0399173803
• ISBN 13: 9780399173806
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar