Showing results by author "Blake Banner" in All Categories

Harry Bauer is a professional assassin. He is employed by Cobra, a shadow agency that provides certain, select Western governments with total deniability, while taking out the trash. Bauer is very good at what he does. In fact, he’s the best. So when the brigadier, his overall boss, tells Bauer to go to Canada, pick up a woman and escort her to DC, he is understandably pissed: He eliminates bad guys, he’s not a nursemaid.

It was November in New York. Raining and cold, and the trees all looked like skeleton’s hands. And Detective John Stone was having a problem with habeas corpus, because all there was of the body were two bare arms. Two bare arms that somebody, 12 years ago, had put in a lock up in the East Bronx. What they had done with the rest of the woman, nobody knew. But as Stone and Dehan start to investigate, two things become clear: Whoever killed the woman, wanted her arms to be found, as a boast, as a challenge. And that meant they were dealing with a psychopath—a serial killer.

It wasn’t just the 20 years since Danny Brown’s death that made it the hardest case of their careers: it was that the manner of his death was, quite simply, impossible. His body was reduced to ash from his neck to his ankles, in the middle of Soundview Park. Detective Stone keeps an open mind, but his partner, Detective Dehan, is convinced there is a logical terrestrial explanation for the gruesome murder. The X-Files, after all, exist only in fiction, don’t they?

When SAS vet. Lacklan Walker buries his father at the family graveyard in New England, the last person he expects to see at the funeral is his childhood friend and sweetheart, Marni — the woman who’d killed his father. To make things more complicated, his father’s dying wish was that Lacklan should look after her and protect her. Because Marni is on a mission, a mission to bring down the shadowy organization called Omega, the government within a government, a mission that might just save Mankind.

Detective John Stone had a marriage made in heaven. His wife was young, beautiful and smart, and she was his partner in the Cold Cases unit at the 43rd. They were tight, close, and practically telepathic. At least, that was what he’d always thought - until she got an interest outside their marriage, and that interest became a passion.

It seemed to be a cold case like any other. So much so that Stone and Dehan hadn’t even considered reviewing it—until private investigator Karl Baxter requested a copy of the police file. Then Stone got curious. Why did a second-rate PI in the Bronx want to look into the case of a low-life petty criminal found tied to a chair in his apartment, beaten and shot through the heart? And that question led to other questions, like, whose was second pool of blood on the floor? If there was a second victim, where was the body?

One thing Harry Bauer knew for certain: He was not a man who could ever fall in love and make a home. Until it happened. And then he knew something else. He had to give up his job as an assassin for Cobra. He could not lie to that woman, he could not bring danger into her life. But then a hit squad came after him, and Cobra made him an offer he could not refuse. One last job, the Einstaat Brief, and they would keep her safe.

Why was Dr. Robert Magnusson murdered? More to the point, why was he murdered 500 miles from anywhere, in the frozen wilderness of Greenland? And then there is the question of what he was doing 70 miles north of the UCLA base camp, where he should have been—and what were the instruments he had secretly set up and housed in the shack out there?

When the body of a tramp was found in a dumpster on Lafayette and Bryant in the Bronx, with no papers and no ID, the case was filed as unsolved–another victim nobody cared about, shot by some punk nobody cared about. That was 12 years ago. Then Detective Stone notices that the "tramp" had a $100 haircut and manicured nails. That makes him curious. He wants to know, who dresses a murder victim up as a tramp, then leaves them in full view in a dumpster? But the answers he gets are not the ones he expects.

ODIN is an organization which is above top secret. It coordinates intelligence from the so-called Five Eyes The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—and it acts on that intelligence. For that reason it’s level of security is the highest on the planet.

To most people, the threat of a nuclear holocaust was something that belonged to the years of the Cold War, something they associated with the United States and the Soviet Union, something that was laid to rest by Gorbachev and Reagan, back in the ‘80s, when the Berlin Wall came down. So when Alia Gallin’s murder was reported to ODIN agent Alex Mason, the last thing he thought of was that this could be part of the build up to a nuclear war. All Mason could think of was his rage, finding the killers and punishing them.

When a leading international financier is murdered in his Beverly Hills mansion, at first it looks like just another daemon at work in the City of Angels. But when the ritual nature of the killing emerges, the FBI takes an interest. And then the international connections start to emerge: the European Commission, high-ranking officials in Hong Kong...and Iran. That’s when the file gets passed to ODIN and Alex Mason.

The Russians have a special way of gambling. They take a revolver and they place one round the chambers and spin it. Then they take it in turns to put the gun to their heads and pull the trigger. It’s called Russian Roulette. Now they have a new, deadlier way of playing it.

Helen Troy is in the race to become the first Female President of the United States. She is pretty, feminine, assertive and a guy’s guy kind of girl, who smokes cigars and drinks whisky with the best of’em. Everybody loves her; but nobody has heard of her till now and she has an uphill fight against some experienced heavy hitters. But that’s not her biggest problem.

It was the first time John Stone had been back to London for 15 years. Last time had been on an exchange program between the NYPD and Scotland Yard: an exchange of skills and experience that was supposed to last six months, but went one for a year and a half.

A leak at GCHQ–the UK’s version of the NSA–means that sensitive Allied and Israeli intelligence is being fed to Iran and Israel’s wider enemies. ODIN, the Five Eyes’ ultra-secret Special Operations Office, has teamed up their best operative, Alex Mason, with the Mossad’s Captain Aila Gallin to investigate and plug the leak.

There is nothing unusual about a young Catholic girl from the Bronx winding up raped, beaten, strangled, and decapitated—unless she winds up that way in Lefthand Canyon, in the Colorado Rockies, where there hasn’t been a murder since 1922. Then it’s unusual enough to become a problem for the sheriff of Lee County. And when he finds no blood at the scene and no physical evidence, it becomes more than a problem. It becomes a headache—for five long years. That’s when he bats it back to the Bronx, to the 43rd precinct, and right onto Detectives Stone and Dehan’s desk.

There is a time bomb ticking down toward a global extinction event. The bomb has a name, and everybody knows where it is. In fact, people pay to go and see it, and have picnics around it. It’s called the Yellowstone Caldera, and when it next blows it will probably take out mankind.

In the wake of the Vietnam debacle, when the mighty USA was humiliated by Soviet-backed Vietcong, the CIA plotted to drag the USSR into a "Russian Vietnam" in Afghanistan. The plan was such a success it led ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, 40 years on, as Russia limps, scarred and crippled, from the battlefields of Kherson, Donetsk, and Kharkiv, Colonel Alexandrina Vitsin swears to drag the USA into an American Ukraine.

It is almost two years since Lacklan walker, veteran Captain with the British SAS, helped Carmen Vazquez escape from the clutches of the Sinaloa Cartel in Arizona. He never expected to hear from her again, and he certainly never expected to hear from her brother. So when Lacklan receives a text message claiming to be from Charlie Vazquez, saying that he is in New York, that his life is in danger and that he needs help, Lacklan is intrigued, to say the least.