The CIA is on edge. All signs indicate that something is coming at the United States. Perhaps another 9/11, maybe bigger. The body of CIA agent Louis Updegraf ends up on the steps of the US Embassy in Mexico. His last operation was to tap into the communications of the Chinese Embassy, but there is no record of why. He appeared to be freelancing and the Agency must scramble to get a clue as to what he was after. Kirk McGarvey, serving as a visiting professor at the University of Florida, is once again longing for the action of the field. So when his old friend Otto Rencke asks him to help figure out the connection between China and the murdered agent, it takes almost no effort to get McGarvey up and running. The only informant they can find is an enigmatic Iranian belly dancer--the dark and lovely Shahrzad Shadmand. But her story changes with the wind, and her knowledge of McGarvey's past is uncanny. Kirk McGarvey must unravel her shattered mind to get to something that might resemble the truth.
David J. Hagberg (born in Duluth, Minnesota) is an American novelist best known for his techno-thrillers featuring super-spy Kirk McGarvey. It is said that in his novel "Joshua's Hammer", for example, written in 2000, Hagberg gives a chilling account of a mega-terrorist plot by Osama bin Laden to kill thousands of Americans on their home soil, published a full year before the World Trade Center Attacks. His scenario of McGarvey tracking bin Laden to his urban lair in Pakistan and shooting him in the head—far from Tora Bora’s caves—was described and executed in “Allah’s Scorpion (2007)” four years before the eerily similar event echoed Hagberg’s novel.
Like many "cloak-and-dagger" novelists, Hagberg has a professional background in espionage, having spent his stint of military duty as a cryptographer for U.S. Air Force Intelligence. Hagberg apprenticed as a spy writer by contributing more than 20 "work-for-hire" entries in the Nick Carter - Killmaster series of espionage novels between 1976 and 1987. He also wrote "work-for-hire" novels based on the Flash Gordon comic strip. Source: Wikipedia
