Read more
Zusatztext “Almost unbearable tension…[the] prose urges you on like a silencer poking at the small of your back.”— Entertainment Weekly “[A] Tom Clancy-esque thriller.”— USA Today “Ingenious.”— The Washington Post “Fascinating...a novel of plots and counterplots...The relationship between Osbourne and October is rich in detail and complexity.”— The Orlando Sentinel “Rousing…Movie-tense action sequences [and] a hero worth rooting for.”— Kirkus Reviews "Starting with a bang and escalating from there! Silva’s latest has everything you would expect from a thriller.”— The Rocky Mountain News Informationen zum Autor Daniel Silva Klappentext The #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Gabriel Allon series presents the second thriller featuring former CIA Agent Michael Osbourne, following The Mark of the Assassin . When the Good Friday peace accords are shattered with three savage acts of terrorism, Northern Ireland is blown back into the depths of conflict. And after his father-in-law is nominated to become the new American ambassador to London, retired CIA agent Michael Osbourne is drawn back into the game. He soon discovers that his father-in-law is marked for execution. And that he himself is once again in the crosshairs of a killer known only as October, one of the most merciless assassins the world has ever known... Leseprobe Belfast--Dublin-- London Eamonn Dillon of Sinn Fein was the first to die, and he died because he planned to stop for a pint of lager at the Celtic Bar before heading up the Falls Road to a meeting in Andersontown. Twenty minutes before Dillon's death, a short distance to the east, his killer hurried along the pavements of Belfast city center through a cold rain. He wore a dark green oilskin coat with a brown corduroy collar. His code name was Black Sheep. The air smelled of the sea and faintly of the rusting shipyards of Belfast Lough. It was just after 4 p.m. but already dark. Night falls early on a winter's night in Belfast; morning dawns slowly. The city center was bathed in yellow sodium light, but Black Sheep knew that West Belfast, his destination, would feel like the wartime blackout. He continued north up Great Victoria Street, past the curious fusion of old and new that makes up the face of central Belfast--the constant reminders that these few blocks have been bombed and rebuilt countless times. He passed the shining façade of the Europa, infamous for being the most bombed hotel on the planet. He passed the new opera house and wondered why anyone in Belfast would want to listen to the music of someone else's tragedy. He passed a hideous American doughnut shop filled with laughing Protestant schoolchildren in crested blazers. I do this for you, he told himself. I do this so you won't have to live in an Ulster dominated by the fucking Catholics. The larger buildings of the city center receded, and the pavements slowly emptied of other pedestrians until he was quite alone. He walked for about a quarter mile and crossed over the M1 motorway near the towering Divis Flats. The overpass was scrawled with graffiti: vote sinn fein; british troops out of northern ireland; release all pows. Even if Black Sheep had known nothing of the city's complex sectarian geography, which was certainly not the case, the signs were impossible to miss. He had just crossed the frontier into enemy territory--Catholic West Belfast. The Falls spreads west like a fan, narrow at its mouth near the city center, broad to the west, beneath the shadow of Black Mountain. The Falls Road--simply "the road" in the lexicon of Catholic West Belfast--cuts through the neighborhood like a river, with tributaries leading into the thickets of terraced houses where British soldiers and Roman Catholics have engaged in urban guerrilla wa...
