The Last Choirboy

Zachary Mannheim has settled into enforced retirement after the taking the blame for political fallout from Russia's successful assassination of CIA Director Ted Granholm, the fiasco associated with an Iranian physicist's attempt to betray Iran's nuclear development program to CIA, and the bloody embarrassment made for TV trade of prisoners on the Bridge of Spies in Berlin. A pending, high level, trade between Russia and CIA will, if consummated, allow President Putin's highest-ranking Intelligence and political officers to be killed at Norway's Trondheim Cathedral during the traditional Christmas Concert Program. Craig Hall, POTUS's National Security Advisor and political hatchet-man, is by disposition and governmental brief, a skilled liar with an appreciation for backstabbing irony. In the White House he asks Mannheim to enumerate the risks and identify the players involved in Operation Reformation a combined Russian/CIA operation neither man authorized nor understands.

Hall's instructions appear forthright and guileless. "Define the scope of the threat, if a threat exists, be it political or physical. Identify the players, be they American, foreign or both. Develop a strategy to eliminate the threat. Use any resources or assets you wish, in your discretion. Don't even consider identifying the assets you utilize, employ or coerce. Our mutual defense...is denial."

Mannheim will be tested in every conceivable way by a series of stunning deceptions, some authored by dead men and others by the worst of enemies on both sides of the Russian/American divide. Morality and ethics stretched too far, Zachary and his old team will freeze, sweat and bleed before the depth of a stunning treachery becomes clear.