DEADLY PEACE

Book excerpt: Thirteen year old Mark Kiley, fascinated by the eagles circling his Jersey Pine Barrens’ home has built a treetop blind to watch and photograph them. When he causally snaps a shot of two men meeting in a nearby clearing, one of them spots the reflection of sun on glass, finds its source, climbs the tree and throws Mark from his blind killing him. Thinking the binoculars around the boy’s neck were the source of the reflection, he doesn’t realize Mark hid the camera before he died. The next day and only weeks before a Presidential election, the country is stunned when over two hundred residents of a Washington high-rise are murdered by terrorists. The following week a high school gym filled with basketball fans is bombed, killing hundreds more. When the body of an ex-Russian agent is found in the rubble, panicked Americans are divided between those wanting an alliance for peace with the Russians and those insisting on retaliation. The conservative incumbent orders a surgical retaliation on a Russian jamming station in Cuba believing this is what the electorate wants. His opponent publicly doubts Russia’s involvement, claiming they would never use one of their former agents to head a terror operation, knowing his identity, in case of capture or death, would easily lead back to them. He insists others must be responsible and that cool-headed leadership and communications with the Russians should have replaced a knee-jerk military response. Mark’s father, Dan Kiley, retired from an elite counter-terror unit, and a recent widower, assumes his son’s death was accidental until he finds the camera and prints the film, the last frame showing the two men in the clearing. The branches of a tree in the frame partially hide the identity of one. The other is the Russian ex-agent found at the scene of the massacre. But who was the other man in the picture? Seeking help, he visits his mentor and the man who organized the counter-terror unit, General Sam Borden, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. When Megan, the General’s daughter, answers the door it re-ignites for Dan the embers of a relationship cooled by the death of her husband in a botched raid. The General offers to help Dan identify the other man in the picture, but before he does, his apparent suicide and the note he leaves behind throws the election into turmoil and starts a congressional witch hunt targeting members of Dan’s old unit. Dan and Megan are cast into a labyrinth of intrigue from which Megan’s escape will depend on Dan’s choices. It is the eve of the inauguration when Dan learns the identity of the other man in the photograph and realizes the extent of a decades old conspiracy culminating in a treaty to be signed at Camp David. Creating for the first time unique alliances and enforceable agreements, the treaty will shape new frontiers in disarmament, health, education, and the economies of developing nations. But when an assassination shatters the signing ceremony, Dan and Megan must decide whether revealing the truth is worth the risk of destroying the promise of an era of world peace.