In I Am Legend, a terrible plague has decimated the world, and those who were unfortunate enough to survive are transformed into blood-thirsty creatures of the night. Robert Neville is the last living man on earth. Every other man, woman, and child has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood. By day, he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive in a world of vampires?
This recording also includes a sampling of other horror stories by Richard Matheson, some comic, all scary: "Buried Talents," "The Near Departed," "Prey," "Witch War," "Dance of the Dead," "Dress of White Silk," "Mad House," "The Funeral," "From Shadowed Places," and "Person to Person."
The Age Of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan's incomparable reckoning with the contemporary financial world, channeled through his own experiences working in the command room of the global economy longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure.
Following the arc of his remarkable life's journey through his more than eighteen-year tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board to the present, in the second half of The Age of Turbulence, Dr. Greenspan embarks on a magnificent tour d'horizon of the global economy. The distillation of a life's worth of wisdom and insight into an elegant expression of a coherent worldview, The Age of Turbulence will stand as Alan Greenspan's personal and intellectual legacy.
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“. . .an engrossing exploration of what really makes Hollywood tick.” —Library Journal
A mind-bending, time-bending, zeitgeist-defining novel about the days leading up to December 21, 2012---the day the Maya predicted the world would end.
December 21, 2012. The day time stops. Jed DeLanda, a descendant of the Maya living in the year 2012, is a math prodigy who spends his time playing Go against his computer and raking in profits from online trading. His secret weapon? A Mayan divination game---once used for predicting corn-harvest cycles, now proving very useful in predicting corn futures---that his mother taught him. But Jed's life is thrown into chaos when his former mentor, the game theorist Taro, and a mysterious woman named Marena Park invite him to give his opinion on a newly discovered Mayan codex.
Marena and Taro are looking for a volunteer to travel back to 664 AD to learn more about a "sacrifice game" described in the codex. Jed leaps at the chance, and soon scientists are replicating his brain waves and sending them through a wormhole, straight into the mind of a Mayan king.
Only something goes wrong. Instead of becoming a king, Jed arrives inside a ballplayer named Chacal who is seconds away from throwing himself down the temple steps as a human sacrifice. If Jed can live through the next few minutes, he might just save the world.
Bringing to mind Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Gary Jennings's Aztec, yet entirely unique, In the Courts of the Sun takes you from the distant past to the near future in a brilliant kaleidoscope of ideas.
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This is a study of how intellectuals as a class affect modern societies by shaping the climate of opinion in which official policies develop, on issues ranging from economics to law to war and peace.
The thesis of Intellectuals and Society is that the influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals.
Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society—and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.
The battle for civil rights was not won in the sixties - certainly not in many parts of the country. It never touched Oxford, North Carolina, where young Tim Tyson was growing up. In 1970, when a black man was killed in the town square by a Klansman and his sons, and an all-white jury acquitted the murderers, both blacks and whites were swept into a firestorm. Amid the violence and fear that enveloped the town, Tim's father attempted to bring the two sides together, only to be reviled as a traitor to both sides. Tim - now a professor of African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin - has written a memoir of that turbulent summer, and has gone back, thirty years later, to find a remnant of scorched justice
From the book
Baptism"Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger." That's what Gerald Teel said to me in my family's driveway in Oxford, North Carolina, on May 12, 1970. We were both ten years old. I was bouncing a basketball. The night before, a black man had "said something" at the store to Judy, his nineteen-year-old sister-in-law, Gerald told me, and his father and two of his brothers had run him out of the store and shot him dead. The man's name was Henry Marrow, I found out later, but his family called him Dickie. He was killed in public as he lay on his back, helpless, begging for his life.I was stunned and bewildered, as if Gerald had informed me that his family had fried up their house cat and eaten it for breakfast. We did not use that word at our house. It was not that I had never heard it or had never used it myself. But somehow the children in my family knew that to utter that word in the presence of my father would be to say good-bye to this earthly life. My daddy was a Methodist minister, an "Eleanor Roosevelt liberal," he called himself in later years, and at our house "nigger" was not just naughty, like "hell" or "damn." It was evil, like taking the Lord's name in vain, maybe even worse. And now my friend Gerald was using it while talking about his daddy and his brothers killing a man.Before Gerald could say anything more, my mother opened the front door of our house and called me in for supper. "What are we having?" I yelled back at her."I am not announcing my menu to the neighborhood," Mama said in a clear but quiet voice. I hurried inside, dumbstruck, wondering what the grown-ups in my world were going to say about Gerald's news. Could this be true? Or was it just a little boy's boasting? Mama and Daddy would know.Mama wielded an abundantly sharp sense of how things were and were not done. That was why she was "not about to advertise my dinner menu up and down Hancock Street," as she reminded me when I came into the kitchen. Pork chops, mashed potatoes and gravy, peppery cabbage simmered with fatback, and crisp fried cornbread served with sweet iced tea seemed no cause for shame. Mrs. Roseanna Allen, the black woman who worked for us, had also made us a chocolate pie that afternoon, as she often did when I begged her. But the details of our supper were beside Mama's point. Yelling like that was "tacky," a label that applied to a disquieting number of my habits.I figured that Mama and Daddy would talk to us about what had happened, but instead an eerie hush hung over the supper table. Somewhat oddly, Daddy refrained from his custom of interviewing us one by one about our day. He and Mama exchanged knowing words and weighted glances whose meanings were indecipherable to me. My twelve-year-old brother, Vern, and I talked halfheartedly about something--how fast Dudley Barnes, who pitched for A&W Root Beer's Little League nine, could throw a baseball, something like that. But a deep silence had fallen among us.After supper, my little sister Boo and I crept out of the house and down to the corner, where we huddled on the sidewalk behind Mrs. Garland's cement wall, across the street from the Teel house. Boo was seven years old, blond and freckly, by turns deferential and officious in the way of little sisters, and she went wherever I did, provided I let her. In the Bible, Ruth tells Naomi, "Entreat me not to leave thee; or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge," and while this was frequently quoted as a tribute to filial devotion, I always noted that we never...
A New York Times reporter has drawn upon his experience covering the occupation in Iraq to write the most gripping and chillingly plausible thriller of the post-9/11 era. Alex Berenson’s debut novel of suspense, The Faithful Spy, is a sharp, explosive story that takes readers inside the war on terror as fiction has never done before.
John Wells is the only American CIA agent ever to penetrate al Qaeda. Since before the attacks in 2001, Wells has been hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, biding his time, building his cover.
Now, on the orders of Omar Khadri–the malicious mastermind plotting more al Qaeda strikes on America–Wells is coming home. Neither Khadri nor Jennifer Exley, Wells’ superior at Langley, knows quite what to expect.
For Wells has changed during his years in the mountains. He has become a Muslim. He finds the United States decadent and shallow. Yet he hates al Qaeda and the way it uses Islam to justify its murderous assaults on innocents. He is a man alone, and the CIA–still reeling from its failure to predict 9/11 or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq–does not know whether to trust him. Among his handlers at Langley, only Exley believes in him, and even she sometimes wonders. And so the agency freezes Wells out, preferring to rely on high-tech means for gathering intelligence.
But as that strategy fails and Khadri moves closer to unleashing the most devastating terrorist attack in history, Wells and Exley must somehow find a way to stop him, with or without the government’s consent.
From secret American military bases where suspects are held and "interrogated" to basement laboratories where al Qaeda’s scientists grow the deadliest of biological weapons, THE FAITHFUL SPY is a riveting and cautionary tale, as affecting in its personal stories as it is sophisticated in its political details. The first spy thriller to grapple squarely with the complexities and terrors of today’s world, this is a uniquely exciting and unnerving novel by an author who truly knows his territory.
"The plotting is superlative, baffling readers and characters alike as the mastermind behind al-Qaeda's sleeper network wages covert war against a vigilant and resourceful enemyone could hardly ask for a more skillful, timely, and well-rounded translation of our worst fears into satisfying thrills; a sure bet for fans of Jack Higgins and Vince Flynn."
"The nation needs to be confronted with the crime that we’re committing and the promises we are betraying. This is a book about betrayal of the young, who have no power to defend themselves. It is not intended to make readers comfortable."
Over the past several years, Jonathan Kozol has visited nearly 60 public schools. Virtually everywhere, he finds that conditions have grown worse for inner-city children in the 15 years since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. First, a state of nearly absolute apartheid now prevails in thousands of our schools. The segregation of black children has reverted to a level that the nation has not seen since 1968. Few of the students in these schools know white children any longer. Second, a protomilitary form of discipline has now emerged, modeled on stick-and-carrot methods of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons but targeted exclusively at black and Hispanic children. And third, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education in our inner-city schools has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society.
Filled with the passionate voices of children and their teachers and some of the most revered and trusted leaders in the black community, THE SHAME OF THE NATION is a triumph of firsthand reporting that pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems by the Bush administration. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens.
CHAPTER 1 Dishonoring the Dead One sunny day in April, I was sitting with my friend Pineapple at a picnic table in St. Mary's Park in the South Bronx. I had met Pineapple six years earlier, in 1994, when I had visited her kindergarten class at P.S. 65. She was a plump and bright-eyed child who had captured my attention when I leaned over her desk and noticed that she wrote her letters in reverse. I met her again a few weeks later at an afterschool program based at St. Ann's Church, which was close to P.S. 65, where Pineapple and a number of her friends came for tutorial instruction and for safety from the dangers of the neighborhood during the afternoons. The next time I visited her school, it was the spring of 1997. She was in third grade now and she was having a bad year. The school was in a state of chaos because there had been a massive turnover of teachers. Of 50 members of the faculty in the preceding year, 28 had never taught before; and half of them were fired or did not return the following September. Very little teaching took place in Pineapple's class during the time that I was there. For some reason, children in her class and other classes on her floor had to spend an awful lot of time in forming lines outside the doorways of their rooms, then waiting as long as 30 minutes for their turn to file downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch, then waiting in lines again to get their meals, then to go to recess, then to the bathroom, then return to class. Nearly two hours had elapsed between the time Pineapple's classmates formed their line to go to lunch and finally returned. On another day when I was visiting, before the children were allowed to have their lunch they were brought into an auditorium where old cartoons like Felix the Cat and Donald Duck and other flickering movies from the past were shown to keep them occupied before their class was called to file down into the cafeteria. The film in the film projector, which must have been very old, kept slipping from its frames. The lights would go on and kids would start to hoot and scream. I sat beside Pineapple and her classmates for three quarters of an hour while a very angry woman with a megaphone stood on a stage and tried to get the room under control by threatening the kids with dire punishments if they did not sit in perfect silence while they waited for the next cartoon. In the following year, when she was in fourth grade, Pineapple had four different teachers in a row. One of them was apparently a maladjusted person who, Pineapple said, "used swear words" to subdue the children. ("A-S-S-E-S!" Pineapple said politely, since she did not want to speak the word itself.) One was fired for smoking in the building. Another was "only a helper-teacher," Pineapple reported, which, a member of the faculty explained, might have been a reference to an unprepared young teacher who was not yet certified. Pineapple, who had always been a lively and resilient little girl, grew quite depressed that year. When Pineapple used to talk to me about her school she rarely, if ever, spoke in racial terms. Going to a school in which all of her classmates were black or Hispanic must have seemed quite natural to her--"the way things are," perhaps the way that they had always been. Since she had only the slightest knowledge of what schools were like outside her neighborhood, there would have been no reason why she would remark upon the fact that there were no white children in her class. This, at least,...
The Shadows is a historic 1920s house that inspires preservationist’s dreams–and developers’ schemes. Built during Prohibition by a notorious rumrunner who vanished at sea, it was inherited by his son, a local athlete and war hero who lived down his father’s wild reputation. He served a successful term as Miami mayor and raised his four young children at the Shadows–until a shotgun ambush on a hot summer night forty-four years ago. His murder was never solved. Since then, only secrets and whispers have inhabited the Shadows.Now, a resourceful young preservationist approaches the Miami Police Department’s Cold Case Squad to help block a developer’s plan to bulldoze the Shadows and build high-rise towers. The detectives visit the long-abandoned pioneer house, now surrounded by a wild and overgrown subtropical forest. They discover the rumrunner’s secret limestone cellar, a tunnel to Biscayne Bay, and seven small, heartbreaking new mysteries–a lost generation.Cold Case Squad Lt. K. C. Riley and her detectives seek out the murdered man’s widow and children for answers. All are evasive and paranoid, haunted by lies, guilt and tangled pasts that each recalls differently. Ultimately the squad finds that the killer is still out there, and the old, cold case is hotter than ever.
A grand and revelatory portrait of Wall Street's most storied investment bank...
Wall Street investment banks move trillions of dollars a year, make billions in fees, pay their executives in the tens of millions of dollars. But even among the most powerful firms, Lazard Frères & Co. stood apart. Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were its weapons of choice. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built.
William D. Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes the reader into the mysterious and secretive world of Lazard and presents a compelling portrait of Wall Street through the tumultuous history of this exalted and fascinating company.
Cohan deconstructs the explosive feuds between Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner, superstar investment bankers and pillars of New York society, and between the man who controlled Lazard, the inscrutable French billionaire Michel David-Weill, and his chosen successor, Bruce Wasserstein.
Cohan follows Felix, the consummate adviser, as he reshapes corporate America in the 1970s and 1980s, saves New York City from bankruptcy, and positions himself in New York society and in Washington.
Felix's dreams are dashed after the arrival of Steve, a formidable and ambitious former newspaper reporter. By the mid-1990s, as Lazard neared its 150th anniversary, Steve and Felix were feuding openly. The internal strife caused by their arguments could not be solved by the imperious Michel, whose manipulative tendencies served only to exacerbate the trouble within the firm.
Increasingly desperate, Michel took the unprecedented step of relinquishing operational control of Lazard to one of the few Great Men still around, Bruce Wasserstein, then fresh from selling his own M&A boutique, for $1.4 billion.
Bruce's take: more than $600 million. But it turned out Great Man Bruce had snookered Great Man Michel when the Frenchman was at his most vulnerable.
THE LAST TYCOONS is a tale of vaulting ambitions, whispered advice, worldly mistresses, fabulous art collections, and enormous wealth—a story of high drama in the world of high finance.
"Cohan's portrayal of the firm's dominant partners--whose gargantuan appetites and mercurial habits provide the unifying force behind the book's operatic melodramas-- makes this an epic . . . In fact, The Last Tycoons bears a striking resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon."
CHAPTER 1"GREAT MEN"Even among the great Wall Street firms--Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch--Lazard Frères & Co. stood apart, explicitly priding itself on being different from, and superior to, its competitors. For 157 years, Lazard had punched above its weight. Unlike other Wall Street banks, it competed with intellectual rather than financial capital and through a hard-won tradition of privacy and independence. Its strategy, put simply, was to offer clients the wisdom of its Great Men, the finest and most experienced collection of investment bankers the world had ever known. They risked no capital, offering only the raw Darwinian power of their ideas. The better the idea, and the insights and tactics required to achieve the result contemplated by it, the greater was Lazard's currency as a valued and trusted adviser--and the larger were the piles of money the Great Men hauled out of the firm and into their swelling bank accounts. The lucky few men--yes, always men--at Wall Street's summit have always been portrayed as ambitious and brilliant on the one hand and unscrupulous and ruthless on the other. But the secret history of Lazard Frères & Co., the world's most elite and enigmatic investment bank, twists parts of this conventional wisdom into knots of unfathomable complexity. The Great Men chronicled herein amassed huge fortunes--to be sure--but they refused to admit to anyone, least of all to themselves, that their pursuit of these riches led to relentless infighting. Instead they spoke, without irony, of being part of a Florentine guild and of advice whispered to heads of state and to CEOs of the world's most powerful corporations, while all the time attempting to preserve the mythical special idea that was Lazard. They also, to a person, craved an equally elusive chimera: the assurance that somehow, despite everything, they alone had remained virtuous.But starting in the mid-1980s, the wisdom of Lazard's Great Men strategy began to show its considerable age, especially when Lazard was compared with its better capitalized and more powerful and nimble foes. The firm's numerous strategic missteps were exacerbated by the increasingly titanic generational struggle inside Lazard between the likes of Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner--superstar investment bankers and pillars of New York society--as well as by the bizarre behavior of the increasingly isolated and bitter Michel David--Weill, the French billionaire who controlled Lazard and fomented the struggle from his imperial lair. And at the climactic moment, Bruce Wasserstein, the supreme opportunist, came along to pick Michel's considerable pockets. The decades of internal turmoil and paternalistic management led ultimately to the once--unthinkable: a Lazard Frères free from its founders, as a publicly traded company just like any other, its operational flaws and obscene profitability open to the world--its special cachet lost forever.The story of Lazard has always been one of internecine warfare, calamity, and resurrection, proving definitively that the forces of "creative destruction"--in the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter's famous observation--are alive and well to this day in American capitalism.
In 1743, a Russian ship was blown off course and trapped in ice off the coast of Svalbard (Spitzbergen), a barren Arctic island. Four sailors went ashore with only two days' supplies. Upon return they found the ship had vanished, apparently crushed and sunk by the ice. The men survived more than six years until another ship blown off course rescued them.
An expert on the literature of adventure, David Roberts was incredulous when he first heard the story. His near-obsessive quest to find the true story culminated with his own journey to the same desolate island. Here, Roberts shares the remarkable story that he discovered, a meditation on the genius of survival against impossible odds.
In the tradition of Scott Turow and Brad Meltzer, this debut novel introduces a bold and entertaining new voice to the legal thriller genre. David Sloane is the best wrongful death attorney in San Francisco. He’s a lawyer who can make juries do anything. But despite his professional success, he’s plagued by a nightmare of a childhood he cannot consciously remember. When he receives a package from a White House confidant who then turns up dead by apparent suicide, the contents reveal a history he never could have imagined. Now, in search of justice, Sloane must depend on two men hes never met: Charles Jenkins, a former CIA agent turned recluse who suffers the same nightmare; and Tom Molia, a police detective willing to take on just about anyone including the U.S. Department of Justice. Together, these men must expose a 30-year conspiracy so insidious that it may reach as far as the Oval Office and topple a presidency if they can stay alive.
A whole new kind of thriller from a remarkable new writer, THE JURY MASTER hurtles through one hairpin turn into another. As a brilliant attorney fights for his life, he gets closer and closer to an explosive truth: about who he is, how little he knows, and who is the master of his fate…
"All of Dugoni's characters have a fresh and believable edge, and there is plenty of action in far-flung settings. One looks forward to Sloane's return."
Three decades after Khomeinist thugs raided the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Westerners are puzzled by Iran. As a nation, Iranians still like the United States. As a revolutionary regime, however, Iran is the principal bastion of anti-Americanism. From Ayatollah Khomeini’s “historic mission” to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s messianic campaign in the name of the “Hidden Imam,” The Persian Night depicts a trajectory that will most likely lead to war. More importantly, it addresses the vital question of how the Iranian regime can be resisted and defeated, enabling Iran to close the chapter of revolution and return to the mainstream of nation-states.
"Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East." —The New Yorker
In SEE NO EVIL, one of the CIA’s top field officers of the past quarter century recounts his career running agents in the back alleys of the Middle East. In the process, Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides compelling evidence about how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA’s efforts to root out the world’s deadliest terrorists.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the terrible result of that intelligence failure with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the wake of those attacks, Americans were left wondering how such an obviously long-term, globally coordinated plot could have escaped detection by the CIA and taken the nation by surprise. Robert Baer was not surprised. A twenty-one-year veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations who had left the agency in 1997, Baer observed firsthand how an increasingly bureaucratic CIA lost its way in the post–cold war world and refused to adequately acknowledge and neutralize the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalist terror in the Middle East and elsewhere.
A throwback to the days when CIA operatives got results by getting their hands dirty and running covert operations, Baer spent his career chasing down leads on suspected terrorists in the world’s most volatile hot spots. As he and his agents risked their lives gathering intelligence, he watched as the CIA reduced drastically its operations overseas, failed to put in place people who knew local languages and customs, and rewarded workers who knew how to play the political games of the agency’s suburban Washington headquarters but not how to recruit agents on the ground.
SEE NO EVIL is not only a candid memoir of the education and disillusionment of an intelligence operative but also an unprecedented look at the roots of modern terrorism. Baer reveals some of the disturbing details he uncovered in his work, including:
When Baer left the agency in 1997 he received the Career Intelligence Medal, with a citation that says, "He repeatedly put himself in personal danger, working the hardest targets, in service to his country." SEE NO EVIL is Baer’s frank assessment of an agency that forgot that "service to country" must transcend politics and is a forceful plea for the CIA to return to its original mission—the preservation of our national sovereignty and the American way of life.
PREFACEIn late 1994 I found myself living pretty much on airplanes. I would arrive in Amman, Jordan, in the late afternoon, check into a hotel, take a quick shower, and then spend the night talking to one Iraqi dissident or another about what to do with Saddam Hussein. Often I wouldn't crawl into bed until well after midnight, only to get up a few hours later to catch a plane back to Washington and my office at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It made for a long day. I was used to it, though, having spent nearly twenty years working the streets of the Middle East at the same pace.Occasionally, in this covert version of shuttle diplomacy, I'd get off the plane in London and just walk around the city so I could catch my breath. I didn't follow a particular route, but often without intending it, I'd end up in the Edgeware Road area, a part of central London taken over by Arabs and other Middle Easterners. With the veiled women, and the men walking around in flowing robes, it felt like I'd never left the Middle East, but there was one subtle difference: the Arabic bookstores.In most parts of the Middle East, bookstores are forbidden from selling radical Islamic tracts that openly advocate violence, but in London's Arabic bookstores there were racks of them. One glance at the bold print and you knew what they were about: a deep, uncompromising hatred for the United States. In the worldview of the people who wrote and published these tracts, a jihad, or holy war, between Islam and America wasn't just a possibility; for them the war was a given, and it was already under way. Having spent so much of my life in the Middle East, I knew that such intense, violent hatred represented an aberration of Islam; but I also knew better than most the human toll that such hatred can take.Often I would pick up a tract and take a look at the small print. Rarely did the publisher or the editor's name appear on the masthead, and office addresses were never noted. But with few exceptions, they carried a European post-office box, often in Britain or in Germany. It didn't take a sophisticated intelligence organization to figure out that Europe, our traditional ally in the war against the bad guys, had become a hothouse of Islamic fundamentalism.Curious, I asked my CIA colleagues in London if they knew who was putting this stuff out. They had no idea, but there was really no reason why they should have. Since our London office couldn't claim a single Arabic speaker, it was unlikely that anyone there was going to wander down Edgeware Road. Even if someone had, he wouldn't have been able to read the venomous headlines. What's more, the CIA was prohibited by British authorities from recruiting sources, even Islamic fundamentalists, in their country. What was the point, then, in spending time with the Arabs there?In general, things were no better on the continent. By the mid-1990s, the CIA was shriveling up everywhere in Europe. Our offices in Bonn, Paris, and Rome were shadows of what they had been during the cold war with the Soviet Union. They lacked the officers to go after Europe's vast Middle Eastern communities, and those they did have too often lacked the inclination, the training, and in some cases the incentive to do so.Things weren't much better in the Middle East. Often there was only one or two CIA officers assigned to a country. Rather than recruit and run sources--foreign agents--CIA stations in the tinderbox of the world spent most of their time catering to whatever was in fashion in Washington at the time: human rights, economic...
A wealthy man tinkering with his vintage sports car is incinerated when the car explodes. Twelve years later, his first wife, believing it was murder rather than an accident, asks Miami's Cold Case Squad - a homicide unit dealing with unsolved cases - to investigate. What they discover is more than just conflicting autopsy reports. Past mysteries abound: a brutal double murder, the haunting seaside image of a reclining woman, and an exotic young seductress without a past. And while the widow and the first-wife point fingers at each other, Miami's Cold Case Squad wonders if the body found beneath the gutted car was really that of the man? And could the killer still be on the prowl - alive and dangerous.
