A Case for Old Spies

Book excerpt: What happens to old spies in retirement? Do they simply fade away, never to be heard from again? How do former covert agents accustomed to working clandestinely on a need-to-know basis reorganize their lives? Zach, a weapons expert and trained assassin, wondered from time to time what he was doing as deputy sheriff on Chipley Island. And then the body of a man he had thought dead for many years rolled up on the beach-on his beach at Pirate's Cove-out of the blue. Chipley Island is not just any island in Virginia. It is the brainchild of the body in the wetsuit. The man was second-in-command to retired U.S. Navy Adm. Jackson Lee Andrews. Together, the two men directed a top secret agency for the President, and when the group was dissolved, the admiral helped set them up on the island. Did he have an ulterior motive? Zach and his wife Josie, known for her eidetic memory and once a courier, gather the group and together they resolve to solve the case of the mysterious body on the beach, a spy of the old school, a legendary agent, and perhaps the best spy of all time. As Josie declares, "What was that old devil up to?"