“Be careful, you girls, and you, too, Guri. Watch for traffic.” Lazlo turned and hugged Janos and Mariya in turn. “Enjoy one another tonight, and we will see you tomorrow.” Lazlo grabbed Eva’s arm. “Come, La Strada woman, let us cross and go up to my room.”
Everyone laughed and scattered into the neighborhood, the young people to their dance club, Janos and Mariya to their hotel room, and Lazlo and Eva to his apartment. Suddenly, Lazlo stopped in the middle of the street.
“What is it?” asked Eva.
“I forgot to toast Jermaine. We are standing where he died, and I forgot to toast him.”
“You toasted my grandson. We are both in our sixth decade. I am a widow, and you are a widower. We forget names, but not memories.”
As if planned somewhere in city hall or higher up, the timing of stoplights left an opening and there were no cars on the block in front of Lazlo’s apartment. He held up an imaginary glass, and Eva, seeing this, did the same.
“To Jermaine,” said Lazlo. “And to all others who break free and fly with the angels.”
Both Lazlo and Eva drank from their imaginary glasses just as the stoplight to the north changed to green.
“That was the purest vodka I’ve ever tasted,” said Lazlo.
Eva laughed and pulled Lazlo’s hand as they continued across the street. “Come, Lazlo. I read recently that to be in one’s sixties is now the new forties. Therefore, let us go to bed.”
Traffic was coming, and they ran the rest of the way. After they jumped up onto the curb, they turned and laughed and stood on the sidewalk to kiss.
The two Chicago detectives in their unmarked car held paper coffee cups as they watched the group exit the Humboldt Ukrainian Restaurant. While the others scattered, they stayed and watched Lazlo Horvath and Eva Polenkaya make their way across the street and finally enter his apartment building. They both stared up and waited for a light to come on in his apartment.
“So what’s the story on watching this Gypsy guy and his wealthy La Strada widow?” asked the detective in the passenger seat.
“The alderman and the chief want to make sure no one comes around for a while. The chief said something about these two stepping on some trafficking and Russian Mafia toes. He’ll never admit it, but the order to protect them came from the Feds.”
“No kidding? I guess the old man and old lady are pretty tough.”
“I guess.”
“The Russian Mafia are rough fucks.”
“Yeah, they are. The chief’s even got Desmond and Havlik watching our backs.”
“Inhuman is what they fucking are … Not Desmond and Havlik. I mean traffickers.”
“I agree.”
“You want more coffee before that place closes up?”
“Sure.”
“Michael Beres skillfully leads us into the fragmented, frustrating world of the injured brain, giving us an engrossing story that blends violence with compassion, and an outcome that suggests hope is something worth clinging to.”
—David J. Walker, Edgar-nominated author of
many novels, including the Wild Onion, Ltd. series.
Retired government agents in Florida cling to a decades-old secret that threatens to wreak havoc on the American political system.
A right-brain stroke victim related to a high profile mobster dies mysteriously at a Chicago rehabilitation facility.
A fellow rehab patient with a left-brain stroke who was a detective in his former life launches his own investigation.
The detective’s wife, desperate to help her husband connect to his past, joins the investigation, makes very large waves, and is kidnapped. An environmental activist is murdered while driving his hybrid vehicle to a clandestine meeting. An aide at the rehab facility, who stumbles into the plot while ripping off the health care system, becomes yet another victim. Saint Mel in the Woods Rehabilitation Facility, aptly nicknamed Hell in the Woods by residents and employees, is the last place you’d expect violence on this scale.
The mob, family legacy, health care scams, a troubled environment, crooked politics, and federal agents authorized to commit murder … Why is it all zeroing in on a rehabilitation facility?
Final Stroke. The ultimate in stroke rehab … Figure it out, or die trying.
ISBN# 9781932815955
Hardcover Thirller
US $24.95 / CDN $33.95
Available Now
www.michaelberes.com
“Chernobyl Murders is a page-turner of the highest order: from the compelling characterization to the vividly described landscape of a devastated Ukraine to the stunning cover art, Beres has penned himself a winner.”
—Paul Goat Allen, Chicago Tribune (September 13, 2008)
1985, a year before the Chernobyl disaster. Hidden away in a wine cellar in the western Ukraine, Chernobyl engineer Mihaly Horvath, brother of a Kiev Militia detective Lazlo Horvath, reveals details of unnecessary risks being taken at the Chernobyl plant. Concerned for his brother and family, Lazlo investigates—irritating superiors, drawing the attention of a CIA operative, raising the hackles of an old school KGB major, and discovering his brother’s secret affair with Juli Popovics, a Chernobyl technician.
When the Chernobyl plant explodes scores of lives are changed forever. As Lazlo questions his brother’s death in the blast, Juli arrives in Kiev to tell the detective she carries his brother’s child. If their lives aren’t complicated enough, KGB major Grigor Komarov enters the fray, reawakening a hard-line past to manipulate deadly resources.
Now the Ukraine is not only blanketed with deadly radiation, but becomes a killing ground involving pre-perestroika factions in disarray, a Soviet government on its last legs, and madmen hungry for power as they eye Gorbachev’s changes.
With a poisoned environment at their backs and a killer snapping at their heels, Lazlo and Juli flee for their lives—and their love—toward the Western frontier.
ISBN# 9781933836294
Hardcover / International Thriller
US $25.95 / CDN $28.95
Available Now
www.michaelberes.com
BLOOD
EAGLE
Robert Barr Smith
A single pistol shot in the night, and an attractive young woman is dead, a suicide. A passing thing in 1931 Munich. Except the dead woman was Adolf Hitler’s niece and mistress, the lovely Geli Raubal. The pistol was Hitler’s. And the location was Hitler’s sumptuous flat.
More than half a century later, despite the facts surrounding Geli’s death, surely no one should care. But western intelligence learns someone does care. Very much. Both the KGB and a well-financed neo-Nazi organization. And both are willing to murder to uncover a long-buried secret connected to Geli’s demise. A secret important enough to torture and kill to find three elderly Germans.
American Tom Cooper and Englishman Simon Berwick, agents of U.S. intelligence and British MI6, are given the mission to find the three before the Russians or the Nazis. Both men have scores to settle. Both lost their families to terrorist bombs. They have killed for their countries in the twilight war of espionage; they will kill again.
More than one person has already died in the desperate race across Germany. More will die before the search ends in a blinding snowstorm above Hitler’s former residence high on the Obersalzburg in Bavaria. And the only reward for the agent who makes a mistake will be a nameless grave.
ISBN# 9781933836102
Hardcover Suspense
US $24.95 / CDN $33.95
Available Now
A special presentation of
FORTY-EIGHT X: THE LENURU PROJECT
by: Barry Pollack
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
—Robert Oppenheimer,
watching the first atom bomb test, July 16, 1945
There are staccato moments that are life changing, sometimes world changing—a single step taken, a yes, a no, a signature, a nod, the swift pull of a trigger. Lawrence McGraw’s life h
ad been full of such moments. Now was to be another.
His special troops were trained to complete their assignment in eight minutes. Not a minute more. Since beginning his mission, he’d focused on time. Success was a matter of discipline, training, and precision. All had been rehearsed—a hundred, no, a thousand times. Little Boy, the first atom bomb, took less than one minute from “Bombs away” on the Enola Gay to its detonation over Hiroshima. One minute to change the world. Link McGraw was going to do it in eight minutes, but it would be no less momentous.
Colonel Lawrence “Link” McGraw crouched on a wooded hilltop, careful to remain unseen. Behind him, a purple hue still hung to the tops of the Hindu Kush Mountains as a setting sun buried itself. Below him, only a few flickering kerosene lamps still illuminated a dozen mud huts in a no-man’s-land village along the porous frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Smoke drifting from the chimney of one of the houses creased the black night sky. A few derelict vehicles lay scattered about, mechanical vegetation in a barren terrain. The night was dark, overcast, moonless. He had chosen it that way.
McGraw wiped sweat from his brow, streaking his camouflage paint. Thirty-six years old, he still fit the image of the steely-eyed, ramrod-straight, invincible soldier the army liked to portray on its recruiting posters. His forehead and cheeks were high, his nose prominent with just a hint of an aquiline bump, and his face was tanned and leathery but creased only at the corners of his eyes, which made his green-eyed gaze seem ever so more piercing. He felt anxious but not fearful, though he knew the next few minutes would be the turning point of his life. Fail here and he would die or, perhaps worse, return to that cold ten-by-ten-foot cage at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he had been imprisoned for nearly a year. Succeed and he would be well on the road to regaining his most prized position, his honor. But there was far more at stake in these moments.
“We’ve got a chance here to change the nature of war,” his commander, General Mack Shell, had admonished him. “To change the way men have fought for millennia; to put an end to our young men fighting and dying in war after war.”
Although his troops had come to kill, they had no concept of sin. McGraw’s soldiers sat still, shoulder to shoulder in the dark confines of an M113 armored personnel carrier, gazing vacantly dead ahead. The hot, dank air felt like a steam cooker, but there was no grumbling, not a sound, except for their steady, almost synchronized breathing. McGraw unlocked the rear hatch of the M113, and they quickly, silently deployed, gathering ghostlike around him, their faces swallowed in the darkness, all but the eerie glow of their eyes. He flashed four fingers on one hand and then four fingers on both hands, four and eight. Forty-eight was the signaled command. They obeyed immediately, readying their specially designed weapons just as he had trained them over the past several months. Forty-eight also stood for the unique genetic code that identified the special nature of these extraordinary troops that he was sending into battle for the first time.
An ancient stone culvert led from his position to the target, a kilometer away. One of his troops kicked at a plastic bag floating in the jetsam of the canal. Several rats scurried past, and the entire platoon gazed after them. Perhaps they just needed to be a little distracted, to feel a little calm before the storm. But McGraw still wondered if they were ready. Forty-eight, he signaled again, reclaiming their attention as they heard the faint snap of his fingers.
McGraw swept his palm across the head of his platoon leader as a gesture of confidence and reassurance. Then he held up one finger for a moment. With that signal, their very breath seemed to stop. He then simply pointed and his troops were gone in an instant. McGraw followed for about a hundred meters to watch their progress but, like a bomb dropped, he knew he couldn’t recall them and couldn’t join them, so he returned.
He illuminated his wristwatch and watched the second hand throb like his heartbeat. There was nothing left for him to do but sit and wait. He wasn’t the praying type. He didn’t believe in supernatural intervention, just training and more training, the right intelligence, and the right weapons. Victory in war, he knew, did not come to gods; it came to flesh-and-blood soldiers.
“The history of men at war is writ large with stories of heroes,” General Shell had said before sending him off, “stories of young men who fight and often die for noble, sometimes ignoble causes. Their actions sometimes elevate them to superhuman or biblical status. They become the legend of an overmatched David defeating a Goliath; a blind and bound Samson defeating the haughty Philistines. But remember, glory is fleeting and the ends of war for survivors are most often filled with nightmares, with trinkets of ribbons and medals, and uniforms that will soon no longer fit.” The general then paused fitfully. “Put an end to it, Link,” he said, pressing on McGraw the firmest of handshakes.
That farewell speech reminded McGraw of his own heroes:
Sidney Coulter, Eagle Scout, valedictorian, age nineteen, died in battle, Amsar, Afghanistan.
Jaime Garza, Mexican immigrant, father of two, age twenty-four, died by RPG, Ramal.
Richard Neilson, car salesman, poker player extraordinaire, age twenty, died by IED, Baghdad.
There were plenty, too many more. Perhaps with this success, he thought, there would soon be no more.
McGraw had made one adjustment on the eve of battle that he knew his general would have frowned upon. He had given each of his troops a shot of brandy. Not enough to get drunk, but enough to slightly dull the frontal cortex that controls executive functioning, that area of the brain that breeds doubt. A little alcohol, he believed, allowed one to think more simply, to dull the noises on the periphery. He took his own swig of the red from his canteen. He, too, needed to dull his doubts.
The village he was attacking was a terrorist camp, and the men there were not novices and certainly not innocent. They were well-trained soldiers who had killed many times before. They not only professed that they were unafraid to die, but that they were eager to die for their cause.
The guard on the observation tower at the edge of the village was vigilant, but he could never have imagined an enemy so furtive. Four razor-sharp blades sliced through the back of his neck like a guillotine, severing his spinal cord just below the second vertebrae. He heard his own body loudly thump to the floor and had only a split second to be astonished at the sight of his executioner before consciousness and then life left him. The guard’s death was one of the more humane that night. Others would die slower, more painful mutilations from a hundred blades. Mustafa, the commander of this camp, a man who had killed dozens of men with his own hand and hundreds more by sending out “martyrs” with bombs strapped to their chests, was the last to die. A dozen of his guards would die before his quarters were breached. He patiently awaited his enemy clutching a Makarov 9mm. When the American soldier leapt into his room, Mustafa put five shots into his torso. None missed. He heard them, the wet thud of bullets impacting flesh, one after the other. His attacker was not wearing body armor, yet he kept coming. The bullets had penetrated both lungs, and blood was pouring into and out of his chest. But even in the throes of death, McGraw’s soldier had more strength than the average man. “They have the strength of ten men,” McGraw had been told more than once, and he was often surprised to discover what feats their endurance and strength could accomplish.
What kind of enemy is this? Mustafa thought in the moments before the blades sliced through him. His larynx was cut first so he couldn’t scream out the last words he thought, Allah! The children of Jews!
McGraw heard only a little wailing, the brief rattle of gunfire, and then came the quiet. He eyed his watch again. The last few seconds of his timetable were clicking away. His heart filled, heavy like it was about to explode, and he bowed his head as if ready for the axe to fall. And then, after 480 seconds—eight minutes exactly—they all returned. Just as in practice, their timing was impeccable.
Like all American soldiers, they were trained to return with their dead and wounded. No man,
no one left behind. There was but one casualty. They laid the body at McGraw’s feet and eyed him. Their gaze was difficult to interpret. Did they want praise or consolation? It was not the time for either. McGraw simply pointed and his troops clambered aboard their truck as they had been trained to do. His job now was to withdraw quickly and quietly. Stealth was essential to his mission.
Of all the primates, the human being is the only one that cries. In fact, only one other land animal cries—the elephant. On this field of battle, there were no elephants around to grieve, and the only tear shed was Link McGraw’s.
What do a trigger-happy bootlegger with pancreatic cancer, an alcoholic helicopter pilot who is afraid to fly, and a dead guy with his feet in a camp stove have in common?
What are the similarities between a fire department that cannot put out fires, a policeman who has a historic cabin fall on him from out of the sky, and an entire family dedicated to a variety of deceased authors?
Where can you find a war hero named Termite with a long knife stuck in his liver, a cook named Hoghead who makes the world’s worst coffee, and a supervisor named Pillsbury who nearly gets hung by his employees?
Sequoyah, Georgia is the answer to all three questions. They arise from the relationship between A. J. Longstreet and his best friend since childhood, Eugene Purdue. After a parting of ways due to Eugene’s inability to accept the constraints of adulthood, he reenters A.J.’s life with terminal cancer and the dilemma of executing a mercy killing when the time arrives.
Take this gripping journey to Sequoyah, Georgia and witness A.J.’s battle with mortality, euthanasia, and his adventure back to the past and people who made him what he is—and helps him make the decision that will alter his life forever.
Traffyck: The Thrilling Sequel to Chernobyl Murders Page 39