Showing results by author "Blake Banner" in All Categories

Ex SAS Captain Lacklan Walker can’t catch a break. After two tough years his arch enemy, Omega, the shadowy government within a government, are broken and Lacklan is drifting, trying to heal, heading slowly home. That’s how he winds up in Tucson, Arizona, just in time to witness a drive by shooting in which beautiful, innocent, eighteen year-old Celeste Martinez, gets gunned down and dies, holding Lacklan’s hand, staring into his eyes—in Cora’s Golden Café parking lot, a hundred and fifty yards from the Santa Cruz Tucson PD Station.

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. Or so they thought, until top ODIN agent Mira Finn was murdered in Paris, her tortured body dragged from the Seine. A handful of people knew she was in France, fewer than that knew what her mission was.

October, 2010, Sally Jones had been stabbed in the heart in her apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, in the Bronx. Her coat was on the back of her chair. Her shoes were beside her bed, her clothes were neatly folded, and she was dead under the sheets.

There are a lot of things you really don’t want to find when you’re a homicide detective in the Bronx. High on the list is a new serial killer. Serial killers are real bad news because they kill without motive, so they are hard to trace and they can take years to catch. But even worse than a new serial killer, is a new kind of serial killer: one who murders with a motive, but a motive so unfathomable nobody can understand it; a motive that makes his choice of victims incomprehensible and unpredictable, a motive that leads to each victim being killed in a particularly cruel and unusual way.

The world population is hurtling toward nine billion; some say more than the planet can support. Two titanic blocks rule that population – East and West – bound together in a global economy - and a secret, war to the death. Never has so much been at stake, never has the prize of absolute power been more seductive. And never have the leaders of these titanic blocks been quite so insane. Insane enough to invoke the Son of Hell, to bring the war out of the shadows and fire down from Heaven; and count the dead not in dozens but millions.

The Cold Cases team at the 43rd Precinct in the Bronx tend to focus on homicides. But now, Detective John Stone, head of the team, is curious about a two year-old rape case. A rape case where Sadie Byrne got HIV, turned out to be a rapid progressor and died of AIDS within a year. She never named her attacker.

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 take 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.

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.

When your only training is as a first class killer, it can be hard to find a job on Main Street. Unless you work for Cobra, the secret agency that takes out the worst of the world’s trash. So when Harry Bauer left the Regiment, the toughest special ops outfit on the planet, Cobra offered him a job, taking out the trash. Bauer had grown up fighting for survival on the streets of the Bronx. He knew everything there was to know about hard reality, and he didn’t buy into fantasies or conspiracy theories. Until, that is, one came knocking on his door...

Kicked out of the SAS, Harry Bauer is sent home and told to be like everyone else...but he's not like everyone else... What do you do when the only skill you ever learned was how to kill, when you’re among the best of the best, but they tell you you can’t do that anymore? What do you do when they send you home from Afghanistan and tell you to get a job, like everybody else? But you’re not like everybody else.

Captain Lacklan Walker, ten-year veteran of the British SAS, has delivered a devastating blow to his arch enemies, Omega, the shadowy world government that has been manipulating world affairs, guiding them toward a single, inescapable catastrophic event out of which they would rise supreme. But now they are crippled, all but finished…

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.

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.

It seems to be a kiss and tell season thanks to black ops whistleblowers and journalists willing to come out and tell their stories, lured by the promise of fortunes to be made from book sales and media celebrity. But this time, it’s a little different.

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?

It started with a dream. A dream where the hunter was hunted by a baying pack lusting for blood and power. And when he awoke from that dream, Lacklan Walker, ten year veteran of the SAS, knew his days of killing were not over yet. They would never be over until the pack was dead. This would be a mission like none other. Now he would answer to nobody but himself. He could have no allies, no support, no back up, because what he was going to do was nothing less than assassination.

Sebastian Acosta has been gunned down at three a.m. on a Saturday morning, sitting behind the wheel of a beaten-up Toyota. The passenger door is open, and a few paces away, his pal Luis Irizarry lies with his life ebbing away through two gunshot wounds in his chest. It should be a red-hot case, except that 15 years earlier, Rosario Rojas was raped and strangled in that same house, the house Luis was crawling toward, the house that belonged to Angela Rojas, Rosario’s daughter. Rosario, who was like a sister to Marta Flores, Detective Dehan’s mother.

Hurricane Sarah, the largest in recorded history, is howling in off the Atlantic, straight toward New Orleans—and Lacklan Walker is headed for the eye of the storm. His father’s dying wish was that he keep Marni safe, but Marni has sworn to bring down Omega, the government-within-the government, and that is anything but safe.

Nobody has ever heard of ODIN. ODIN is about as secret as a government agency can get. Because within ODIN there is General Operations, which speaks for itself; ODIN 5i, which deals with intelligence gathering; and then there is ODIN 1i, which deals in operations so sensitive not even the CIA can touch them. All three are run with an iron first by The Chief, a giant with a gigantic IQ. His top agent is Alex Mason. But when an ODIN 5i agent based at the US Embassy in Manila goes missing and his encrypted laptop disappears with him, the whole ODIN structure is put in peril.

SAS veteran Lacklan Walker has been searching for Marni. She murdered his father, but his father’s dying wish was that Lacklan should keep her safe; safe from Omega, the government-within-the government, whose plans for humanity Marni has sworn to expose. And that is anything but safe.