Agent Andy Clayton has been kept inactive for eighteen months, kept under tight surveillance at his home in Washington D.C. But now he is needed: Leonid Borikowski, code name Dragonfly, has been seen entering the U.S. and Clayton is the only man who may be able to find him, and stop him.

For Clayton, it is much more than a routine assignment. He knows Dragonfly—has faced him before—and he wants him. His interest is as personal as it is professional: He wants revenge on the foreign agent who killed Duncan Clayton, his twin brother. But there is much that Clayton doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that Borikowski is carrying perhaps the most important, and dangerous, biological discovery the world has ever known. He doesn’t know that the microbe is in a suitcase armed with a device that will explode if Borikowski is harmed. And he doesn’t know about the Soviet intelligence project code-named Bookends—a project that will not be complete until Andy meets the same fate as his brother.

The ensuing chase takes him across the United States and Canada, putting himself, the woman he loves, and thousands of innocent people in jeopardy; and his thirst for revenge takes him into the darkest, most dangerous corners of his own personality.

It starts out so simply for Jay Becker—he’s just an overworked, underpaid musician trying to earn some extra cash by giving sailing lessons on Puget Sound. But he is drawn into a whirlwind of events and characters that will change his life—and perhaps the future of his country—forever.

It begins when he meets the exotic, mysterious Marlene—a beauty with a dark secret who wants to hire Jay for what appears to be a simple sailing expedition. But once involved, he becomes a link in a deadly chain of events—manipulated by an international network of spies that will stop at nothing to get at the sensitive military secrets they want.

The setting is The Yankee Green—an enormous shopping center/ entertainment mall located in a suburb of Boston. The mall is a self-sufficient, environmentally controlled, electronically secure indoor city; tens of thousands of people pass through its five pavilions every day. The children play in the indoor amusement park; the young professionals work out in the state-of-the-art health club and jog on the atrium’s overhead running track; the elderly walk the promenades, sit on benches, chat under the fountains and in the manicured gardens. But the labyrinth of service halls that are weaved into the superstructure lurks a demon: a madman with a grudge, whose plan is to hold five thousand people hostage inside a pavilion he wired to explode.

The setting is Carmel, California—a scenic, peaceful tourist haven where James Dewitt is the police force’s only detective. His usual caseload is stolen bicycles and an occasional burglary. But things change with frightening speed when a series of apparent suicides, which soon prove to be murders, shocks the community. Dewitt, a former forensic scientist, struggles with the minutest of clues in his quest for the killer, while departmental turf wars and local politics increase the pressures on his investigation. But his steps are dogged by renegade ex-cop Howard Lumbrowski, the man Dewitt blames for his wife’s death. How is Lumbrowski connected to the killings? And why does he have information from Dewitt’s confidential files?

Dewitt finds himself playing a dangerous game, breaking his own rules in his desperate search for answers. And as the case takes another murderous twist, the past comes back to haunt Dewitt. He will have to fight to save his reputation—and his life.

FBI agent Cameron Daggett has for years been on the trail of an international triggerman responsible for planting at least two nearly undetectable explosive devices on airplanes. When a strange murder takes place in a Seattle aircraft training installation, Daggett suspects that his nemesis is involved.

The man who was murdered was a specialist in training pilots to fly the Duhning 959-600—a new breed of ultra-sophisticated aircraft—and he was killed in a Duhning flight simulator. Was the killer trying to be taught to pilot one of these super jets? How is this connected to Daggett’s recent discovery of sophisticated altitude detonators? Is Anthony Kort—Daggett’s prey—about to strike again?

Using the most intricate and complex forensic techniques, the aerodynamic and technical principles that make monster jets stay aloft, and sheer cop’s reasoning—Daggett picks up Kort’s trail. He is joined by forensic experts, aerodynamic engineers, and criminal psychologists—but it comes down to Daggett and Daggett alone to see the pattern in the seemingly endless technical detail, and stop a tragedy before it takes place. But Kort is smart, and driven by a motivation that Daggett cannot possibly understand. And when Daggett gets close, Kort makes it personal.