SUMMARY: Chapter 1 Present Day North-West Frontier, on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan sheikh gul scowled at his congregation. “These days every Muslim must fight jihad,” he said in Pashtun, his voice rising. “When the Mongols invaded Baghdad, it didn’t help the people of Baghdad that they were pious Muslims. They died at the swords of the infidels.” The sheikh threw his hands over his head. “Now Islam is under siege again. Under siege in the land of the two mosques, and the land of the two rivers”—Saudi Arabia and Iraq. “Under siege here in Pakistan, where our leader works for Americans and Jews. Everywhere we are under siege,” said the sheikh, Mohammed Gul. He was a short, bearded man with a chunky body hidden under a smooth brown robe. His voice seemed to belong to someone much larger. Inside the mosque, a simple brick building whose walls were covered in flaking white paint, the worshippers murmured agreement and drew together. Brothers in arms. But their assent enraged the sheikh further. “You say, ‘Yes, yes.’ But what do you do when prayers are finished? Do you sacrifice yourselves? You go home and do nothing. Muslims today love this world and hate death. We have abandoned jihad!” the sheikh shouted. He stopped to look out over the crowd and wipe his brow. “And so Allah has subjugated us. Only when we sacrifice ourselves will we restore glory to Islam. On that day Allah will finally smile on us.” Except it sounds like none of us will be around to see it, Wells thought. In the years that Wells had listened to Gul’s sermons, the sheikh had gotten angrier and angrier. The source of his fury was easy to understand. September 11 had faded, and Islam’s return to glory remained distant as ever. The Jews still ruled Israel. The Americans had installed a Shia government in Iraq, a country that had always been ruled by Sunnis. Yes, Shias were Muslim too. But Shia and Sunni Muslims had been at odds since the earliest days of Islam. To Osama and his fellow fundamentalist Sunnis—sometimes called Wahhabis—the Shia were little better than Jews. Al Qaeda, “the Base” of the revolution, had never recovered from the loss of its own base in Afghanistan, Wells thought. When the Taliban fell, Qaeda’s troops fled east to the North-West Frontier, the mountainous border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Wells had narrowly escaped an American bomb at Tora Bora, the last big fight of the Afghan war. He liked to imagine that the bomb had been guided by Glen Holmes, who had swung it away from the hut where Wells hid. But the United States hadn’t closed the noose at Tora Bora, for reasons Wells had never understood. Thousands of jihadis escaped. In 2002, they reached the mountains of the North-West Frontier, so named by the British, since the area was the northwest border of colonial India. The North-West Frontier was a wild land ruled by Pashtuns, devout Muslims who supported Qaeda’s brand of jihad, and was effectively closed to Pakistani and American soldiers. Even the Special Forces could operate there only for short stretches. So Qaeda survived. But it did not thrive. Osama and his lieutenants scurried between holes, occasionally releasing tapes to rouse the faithful. Every few months the group launched an attack. It had blasted a train station in Madrid, blown up hotels in Egypt and subways in London, attacked oil workers in Saudi Arabia. In Iraq, it fought the American occupiers. But nothing that had shaken the world like September 11. Meanwhile Wells and his fellow jihadis eked out a miserable existence. In theory, Qaeda’s paymasters had arranged for Pashtun villagers to house them. In r

From #1 New York Times bestselling author and Edgar Award winner Alex Berenson comes a supercharged thriller about marriage and the dangerous secrets spouses keep.Rebecca and Brian Unsworth appear to have it all. A nice house in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Two well-behaved, healthy teenage children. Important government jobs—Rebecca working in counterterrorism for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Brian serving as a coder for the National Security Agency. Their lives stand to improve even more as Brian, in his off-hours, has just developed and sold a highly profitable app. However, the Unsworths' marriage isn't as perfect as it seems. After two decades together, they've drifted apart, talking little and having sex even less. Seeking to revive their strained relationship, they decide for their twentieth wedding anniversary to take their two kids, Kira and Tony, on a European getaway. They have a blast...until one night in Barcelona when...

“Berenson’s strength is his deep understanding of geopolitics and of the shoddy compromises it demands. He clearly has excellent contacts in the world of shadows. Wells is a complex and satisfying protagonist, tackling bad guys across the world’s conflict zones.”--The New York Times Book Review John Wells goes undercover as the threat of nuclear war skyrockets between the United States and Iran, in the cutting-edge new novel from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author.In an Istanbul hotel, a deep source warns a CIA agent that Iran intends to kill a CIA station chief. Quickly, John Wells is called in to investigate, but before he can get far, the tip comes true. Which means that the next warning the source gives will be taken very seriously indeed. And it’s a big one. We’ve put a package on a ship from Dubai to the United States. A radioactive one. A bomb? Not yet. It’s a test run. As the threat level jumps and the government mobilizes, something still doesn’t smell right to Wells’s old CIA boss Ellis Shafer, and so he sends Wells on a private mission to find out what’s going on. But the two of them are swimming against the tide. From Guatemala to Thailand to Hong Kong to Istanbul, Wells uses every skill he has, including his ability to go undercover in the Arab world, to chase down leads. But it might not be enough. Soon there might be nothing anyone can do to pull the United States back from the brink of war.**

Someone has been manipulating the past record of Senator Boyd, the leading presidential candidate. Or are they only exposing a dark secret he tried to bury? In her search for the truth, Taylor Ferrari, the senator's sensuous campaign manager, is joined by C. J. Cady, a determined United States prosecutor. Taylor and C. J. are forced to confront the twin demons of corruption in Washington and the threat of renewed Japanese militarism. The stakes rise when both of their lives are suddenly on the line while they struggle to resist a romantic turn in their relationship.

Mary was just seven-weeks-old when she was adopted by James and Carol Rowland following her birth in 1949 in the grim and austere surroundings of a home for young unmarried mothers which was governed by Nuns. Mary grew up living happily within the Rowland family home, accepting that she had been adopted and never seeking to know more about the full circumstances surrounding her being given away by her birth mother, Ruth. Now twenty-eight years on and as a single mother raising a daughter of her own, Mary begins to question those long forgotten and still unresolved questions about her own birth, her mother, and as to why she was abandoned at such a young age.The appalling detail of violence and abuse experienced by Ruth throughout her early life as a young Jewish girl transported to the death camp at Birkenau, and again she struggled to make a life for herself after the war – coupled with the shocking detail of her pregnancy will dramatically challenge and change the two...

Former CIA Agent Greg Nielsen thought he had escaped his shadowy past. He was wrong. Someone has found him and is blackmailing him to enter the dangerous game of international espionage once again. But there's one deadly difference: this time, the target is his own country.

To unmask a CIA mole, John Wells must resume his old undercover identity as an al Qaeda jihadi—and hope he can survive it—in the new cutting-edge novel from the #1 bestselling author. It is the most dangerous mission of John Wells's career. Evidence is mounting that someone high up in the CIA is doing the unthinkable—passing messages to ISIS, alerting them to planned operations. Finding out the mole's identity without alerting him, however, will be very hard, and to accomplish it, Wells will have to do something he thought he'd left behind forever. He will have to reassume his former identity as an al Qaeda jihadi, get captured, and go undercover to befriend an ISIS prisoner in a secret Bulgarian prison. Many years before, Wells was the only American agent ever to penetrate al Qaeda, but times have changed drastically. The terrorist organizations have multiplied: gotten bigger, crueler, more ambitious and powerful. Wells knows it may well...

If the experts could point to any single book as a starting point for understanding the subject of intelligence from the late twentieth century to today, that single book would be Allen W. Dulles's The Craft of Intelligence. This classic of spycraft is based on Allen Dulles's incomparable experience as a diplomat, international lawyer, and America's premier intelligence officer. Dulles was a high-ranking officer of the CIA's predecessor—the Office of Strategic Services—and was present at the inception of the CIA, where he served eight of his ten years there as director. Here he sums up what he learned about intelligence from nearly a half-century of experience in foreign affairs.In World War II his OSS agents penetrated the German Foreign Office, worked with the anti-Nazi underground resistance, and established contacts that brought about the Nazi military surrender in North Italy. Under his direction the CIA developed both a dedicated corps of specialists and a...

Hard on the heels of The Russian Endgame comes Allan Topol’s next great thriller. Rife with the exotic backdrops and hairpin plot turns that put Topol on the best-seller list, The Argentine Triangle is a heart-stopping foray into human vice coupled with power accelerating towards catastrophe. In a world fraught with global conspiracy, Craig Page is king.

Twelve year old Nick, escaping from the burning of his grandfather's house by Russian thugs, is caught up in a plot by Russian President Kuznov to recreate the Soviet empire in eastern and central Europe. The linchpin of Kuznov's plan is an agreement with a corrupt Hungarian President to permit Russia to move troops into Hungary. In Allan Topol's fast moving fourteenth novel, Craig Page and Elizabeth Crowder, working with Peter Toth, who bears the scars of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and Peter's grandson, Nick, try to thwart Kuznov's plot. The action moves from Paris to Grozny, to Washington, and finally to intriguing Budapest. Craig, Elizabeth and Nick face repeated attacks on their lives.

The Russians don't just want to influence American elections—they want it all. Former CIA agent John Wells confronts a plot of astonishing audacity as New York Times-bestselling author Alex Berenson goes beyond today's headlines to tomorrow's all-too-real threats.It was supposed to be a terrorist sting. The guns were supposed to be disabled. Then why was there so much blood?The target was the American Airlines Center, the home of the Dallas Mavericks. The FBI had told Ahmed Shakir that his drug bust would go away if he helped them, and they'd supply all the weaponry, carefully removing the firing pins before the main event. It never occurred to Sami to doubt them, until it was too late.When John Wells is called to Washington, he's sure it's to investigate the carnage in Dallas, but it isn't. The former CIA director, now president, Vinnie Duto has plenty of people working in Texas. He wants Wells to go to Colombia. An...

John Wells enters new territory, as he goes underground in East Africa to track four kidnapped Americans and the Somali bandits who snatched them, in the tough, thoughtful, electrifying new novel from the #1New York Times-bestselling author. Four friends, recent college graduates, travel to Kenya to work at a giant refugee camp for Somalis. Two men, two women, each with their own reasons for being there. But after twelve weeks, they’re ready for a break and pile into a Land Cruiser for an adventure. They get more than they bargained for. Bandits hijack them. They wake up in a hut, hooded, bound, no food or water. Hostages. As a personal favor, John Wells is asked to try to find them, but he does so reluctantly. East Africa isn’t his usual playing field. And when he arrives, he finds that the truth behind the kidnappings is far more complex than he imagined. The clock is ticking. The White House is edging closer to an invasion of Somalia. Wells has a unique ability to go undercover, and to make things happen, but if he can’t find the hostages soon, they’ll be dead – and the U.S. may be in a war it never should have begun.