Revue de presse
"The wonderfully over-the-top shenanigans ... are catnip for the Bourne crowd, with subcutaneous implants, listening stations, dead drops, black sites, gunplay, double agents, naval battles, counter-surveillance hocus-pocus, and gadgets galore. And the human intelligence is even more captivating. I'll take good dialogue over exploding pens any day, but Thomson doesn't ask readers to choose."
--Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune
"Sophisticated and slick.... The plot has enough believability to be disconcerting and the high tech details are fascinating."
--Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Additional Praise for Keith Thomson
“Think Carl Hiaasen taking on John Le Carré.”
—Christopher Reich, bestselling author of Rules of Betrayal
“Thomson is now on my shortlist of authors I will drop whatever I'm doing to read.”
—Jon Jordan, Crimespree Magazine
Présentation de l'éditeur
A brand-new heart-pounding technothriller from Keith Thomson, acclaimed author of ONCE A SPY.
Russ Thornton is a hard-hitting journalist known for his ability to take on big targets in government and in business. An old flame, now a Capitol Hill staffer, contacts him out of the blue wanting to disclose some top-secret information. But she is gunned down in cold blood, right in front of him. Worse, the killers are concerned about what Thornton knows, and who he may tell. He finds himself in a game of cat-and-mouse, where the stakes are life and death and the surveillance technology is so sophisticated that he wouldn’t believe it existed—if it weren't implanted in his own head.
Extrait
1
Midazolam, a short-acting sedative, is usually administered orally or by hypodermic needle. Canning liked to use a remote-controlled robotic housefly. On this mild August night, as Canning hid behind the hedges between Lake Michigan and the Sokolovs’ heavily guarded house, his iPhone served as a remote control, sending the robofly darting through a partially open window and into a second floor bedroom. Canning had learned that when Leonid Sokolov was home alone, he favored the breeze off the lake to air-conditioning. All this week, Sokolov’s wife, Bella, and their daughters were vacationing at the Blue Harbor Resort, fifty miles up the coast.
An infrared camera within one of the fly’s bulbous eyes relayed real-time video to Canning’s iPhone. Sokolov lay beneath a quilt, eyes shut, mouth agape, his crown of white hair unmoving against a pillow. The fly would deliver enough midazolam to ensure that he remained asleep for ten minutes. In half that time Canning would climb to the second story and implant a subminiature device beneath the scientist’s scalp.
Canning guided the robofly to a hover over Sokolov’s upper lip. With a tap on the phone, the fly’s abdominal cavity opened and released a midazolam mist, the bulk of which Sokolov inhaled without disruption of his sleep. Canning preferred midazolam to more conventional sedatives because its subjects awoke without any memory of their procedures. He knew the drug occasionally caused abnormally slow respiration, but the risk was remote.
Yet that’s exactly what appeared to be happening now.
The iPhone showed Sokolov’s rate plummeting from a normal twelve breaths per minute to just four. Then he ceased breathing altogether.
Forget implanting the eavesdropping device, Canning thought. Death was certain unless he resuscitated the Russian immediately and then turned him over to paramedics. But the American had gone to extreme lengths to avoid detection, from coming here in a stealth one-man submarine to dressing hood to boots in black neoprene whose surface was electronically cooled to prevent thermal sensors from registering his presence. Saving Sokolov was out of the question. The operational objective was now getting away with killing him.
Canning had learned long ago not just that anything that can go wrong on an op will, but that anything that cannot go wrong will too. It was now second nature for him to plan for
