Despite tripping over their ever-present sibling rivalry, the experienced brother and wunderkind little sister slowly unearth the nearly invisible architect of the attacks, an unlikely enemy, who right in front of America’s eyes, has been orchestrating the clever and evil-minded infiltration of a World-renowned organization for the soul purpose of terrorist proliferation.
To stop the bloodshed and thwart the conspiracy that only they see, the two must take matters into their own hands.
“They always leave a trail,” Nate Wilburn said just before stuffing the fat end of a particularly large fish sandwich into his mouth. Tartar sauce trickled down his chin as the air filled with the malodorous odor of his fried prey.
“I’m not so sure,” his lunch companion conceded. “We’ve been looking at this shit all week and haven’t got a damn thing.”
As much as he hated to admit it, his colleague was right. Here it was Friday already and they were as clueless as a supermodel in a bait shop. He’d spent months trying to convince his boss to give them a shot at the case to which, in a very rare moment of compassion, he granted them one week. One lousy week to dig and poke and cajole their way to the truth and now, for all intents and purposes, it was gone. He knew cash was leaving the building through the backdoor, but here they were still floundering out on the front porch.
“You know what I always say, John,” he responded. “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
“Whatever you say, Yogi,” John Moore chuckled as he carved up his spinach and almond salad with knife and fork.
Nate stared at his friend’s plate. A wise-crack immediately filled a chamber of his brain, but he pulled his finger from the trigger at the last minute. He knew John was already in a bad mood and thought better of adding to it. “Looks…healthy,” he mumbled before swallowing another mouthful of his fish.
To say John was a health nut would be like saying Tiger Woods enjoyed playing golf on occasion. He was six-two and one hundred and fifty pounds of bone and wavy brown hair. His body fat percentage was a negative number and even though he didn’t look athletic he could outrun a greyhound, mainly because he presented no wind resistance.
Conversely, to say Nate was a stickler for the hidden facts of a case would be just as misleading. Minutia was his given middle name, or so he claimed. He was an Irish descendant in an Italian body or a St. Patty’s calzone, as he put it. The short, black curly hair and bushy mustache he wore made him look five years older than his actual twenty-seven. His shoulders were broad and his waist just the opposite. If you put a baseball in his hands he could knock a fly off the tip of your ear from thirty yards without leaving the need to scratch.
“You know fish is a great brain food,” Nate observed as he held up the remaining half of his sandwich, gazing upon it admiringly. “My IQ has gone up five points alone thanks to the selfless sacrifice of this little guy.” He then took another healthy bite.
“Yeah, in twenty years your brain will be overloaded with knowledge, but there won’t be anything left to hold it up,” John answered back.
The two men smiled at each other. They had been working together for nearly five years and had settled into a comfortable routine of sharp, but good-natured barbs that helped relieve the stress of their chosen career as investigative auditors. They had both come straight from college to the Attorney General’s Office, where white-collar criminals were your opponent and the game had no rules. They both liked it that way and were in the middle a nice run of successful fraud recoveries. This one had them both stumped so far, but neither of them was ready to concede.
“Ever have the catfish sticks at the Dinosaur?” John asked. “I’d cross the line for almost anything on their menu.”
Nate didn’t answer.
“I took the wife there last Saturday,” he continued. “Man, it was a zoo. We had a great meal though.”
Nate had a deep look of concentration on his face, like that of a two year-old who was about to fill his diaper. John hadn’t yet noticed.
“And those waitresses? Sweet!” He filled his mouth with a heaping fork full of greens. “What was I thinking when I got married last year? Why didn’t you stop me?”
Finally realizing that he was the only one participating in the conversation, John looked up from his lunch to see why. Noticing a familiar look on Nate’s face, he asked, “What?”
Nate gave him a sly grin.
“You’re not going to tell me are you?” John said, clearly annoyed. He shook his head. “Some things never change.”
John knew Nate had tripped upon the clue they had been searching for and that his colleague was going to keep it to himself for the moment. He would have to play along as he had done many times in the past, watching it unfold at his partner’s discretion. It was frustrating, but also the thing he loved about working with Nate.
“Let’s do our exit when we get back,” Nate said. He gazed back upon his half-eaten sandwich, “like I said, a great brain food.”
“Straight out of today’s headlines…terror in America.”
Allen, New York
“Mr. Dunn certainly knows how to weave a story. The characters seem so real, the situation unthinkable, but then again, maybe not…”
Paul R., Maine
“Fast paced…exciting…a real page-turner.”
Wyatt, Chicago
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