Jack Higgins

On Long Island, a trusted operative for the President nudges his boat up to a pier, when a man materializes out of the rain and shoots him. In London, General Charles Ferguson, adviser to the Prime Minister, approaches his car on a side street, when there is a flash, and the car explodes. In New York, a former British soldier, who is also a bit more than that, takes a short walk in Central Park to stretch his legs, when a man comes up fast behind...

"The new Sean Dillon novel, a knife-edge story of terrorism and revenge, by "the dean of intrigue novelists" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). "The bell tolls at midnight as death requires it." In Washington, D.C., on a night full of rain, a woman is struck down and killed by a hit-and-run driver. But she is not just any woman--she is the assistant to the head of the secret White House department known only as the Basement. And she had secrets of her own....

When detective superintendent Hannah Bernstein is murdered, grief-stricken intelligence operatives Sean Dillon, Blake, and Ferguson set out to catch the killer, unaware that their efforts will have a life-changing impact.

A disturbing tape has made its way to British intelligence, and from them to the new President of the United States: battlefield chatter from an ambush in Afghanistan, in which twelve U.S. Army Rangers and a British medical team died. Most of the Taliban voices are Afghan; however, the voice of the commander bears an Irish accent. The idea that one of their own could be responsible for such a massacre is appalling, and Sean Dillon is put in charge...

"Dispatched by the President to report on the state of still troubled Kosovo, agent Blake Johnson runs into a military man there named Harry Miller, who has the same task from the British Prime Minister. They band together just in time to stop a Russian officer from torching a mosque--or rather, Miller stops him, with a bullet to the forehead. This action will have considerable consequences, not only for Miller and Johnson and their associates, including...

Alexander Kurbsky, a famous Russian writer and ex-paratrooper, fakes his escape from Russia and infiltrates British and American intelligence at the highest levels. He has his own motivations for doing the most effective job possible, which entails murdering anyone in his way--including Charles Ferguson, Sean Dillon and the rest of the group known informally as the "Prime Minister's private army."