I struggled with the guard, struggled to get the Derringer out of his powerful grasp. I barely managed to tumble out of the wheelchair, but my legs, which I had been sitting on for the better part of an hour, would not support me. The blood had left them; they were suffused with a dull tingling; they would not work. I could not get to my feet.
“Freeze!” he bellowed at me, wrestling over the gun.
One more shot! I had one more shot! One shot, and this one, the only one left in the chamber, was a .45 bullet, and if I could just get the goddamned gun free, and get the gun cocked, I could kill Miles, I could save Molly’s father, but the guard had tackled me to the floor beside the wheelchair, and now others were upon me, and Miles, I knew for certain that Miles, that professional killer, wounded and maimed though he was, had his automatic pistol out, had it aimed at Harrison Sinclair, and had squeezed the trigger to silence him forever—
—and then came the explosion.
I was overcome with a cold terror as I gave up struggling against the guard.
First one shot, and then two shots, one right after another, in all three enormous explosions, thundering in the room, followed by a split second of stunned silence and then an eruption of horrified screams and shouts.
Miles had fired three rounds.
He had killed Harrison Sinclair.
I had come close to immobilizing Miles. I had almost stopped him. Molly’s diversion had almost stopped him. We had almost blocked the assassin from killing Molly’s father.
But he had been too resourceful, too quick, too professional.
And, pinned against the floor by a half-dozen security guards now, the .45 round unfired in my gun, which the guard had wrested away from me, I felt myself go limp with exhaustion.
Tears—of frustration, of fatigue, of ineffable sadness—came into my eyes. I could no longer think.
Our plan, our brilliant plan, had failed. I had failed.
“All right,” I said, but it was a broken, hoarse whisper. I lay back, my back hard against the cold floor, while all around me chorused the shouts of horror.
As the crew-cut guard whipped out handcuffs, slipping them first over one wrist and then the other, I stared unbelievingly ahead, in the space between the guard’s arm and his chest, at the front.
I did not believe what I was seeing.
The assassin, Miles Preston, was lying in a crumpled heap at the base of the witness stand, his forehead missing, along with most of the front of his face.
Dead.
Above him, watching in dazed incredulity, was the tall, lanky, somewhat disheveled figure of Harrison Sinclair.
Alive.
And the last thing I saw before they took me away, the last sight, extraordinary and wonderful, virtually a miracle, was Molly. Up in the camera niche, in that square hole in the wall, in which she had first begun screaming.
But she was holding in her extended right hand a matte black pistol, and she was looking at the gun with what seemed to be disbelief, and I am sure that I saw on her face the faintest glimmerings of a smile.
The Washington Post
CIA Revelations Stun Nation
* * *
Senate Hearing Room Explodes in Gunfire After Surprise Appearance by Ex-CIA Director Harrison Sinclair, Long Believed Dead
* * *
BY ERIC MOFFATT
WASHINGTON POST STAFF WRITER
The Hart Senate Office Building last evening was the setting for one of the most amazing scenes to take place in the nation’s capital in recent memory.
During nationally televised hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into alleged corruption in the Central Intelligence Agency, at approximately 7:30 last night, Harrison Sinclair, the former Director of Central Intelligence who had been reported killed in a car accident last May, appeared without warning to give sworn testimony concerning what he said was a “massive international conspiracy” involving the present Director of Central Intelligence, Alexander Truslow, and the government of newly elected German Chancellor Wilhelm Vogel.
But as soon as Sinclair was brought into the hearing room by armed guards, gunfire erupted. One of the gunmen, who was killed, was identified only as a German national. The other assailant was reported to be Benjamin Ellison, 40, an attorney and former CIA operative. No other deaths were reported.
The New York Times
* * *
One Month After Incident at Senate Intelligence Committee Hearings, Questions Linger
* * *
BY KENNETH SEIDMAN
SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON, Jan. 4—In the aftermath of the remarkable events in the Senate last month, the nation remains gripped by the spectacle of a CIA director once thought dead suddenly making an appearance on live television, and the equally astonishing assassination attempt that followed immediately on its heels.
But for all the headlines the Sinclair-Truslow matter occasioned, and the weeks of news analysis, much of the affair remains a mystery.
As is by now well known, Harrison Sinclair, director of the CIA until May of last year, faked his own death in order to escape the threat of death posed by those he was seeking to expose. It is also known that, for several hours following the traumatic incidents in Washington, Mr. Sinclair gave extensive testimony in closed session to the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence, exposing the activities of Alexander Truslow and his colleagues.
But what has become of Mr. Sinclair since the bloodshed in the Hart Office Building last month? Intelligence sources speculate that he may have been killed, but refuse to comment on the record. Five days after the event, Mr. Sinclair’s daughter, Molly, and her husband, Benjamin Ellison, were declared legally dead, after the small craft they were sailing off Cape Cod was discovered to have capsized. Intelligence sources would not confirm allegations that the couple, like Mr. Sinclair, were murdered. The fate of the three remains a mystery.
A Capitol Hill security spokesman stated recently that Ms. Sinclair was believed to have entered the hearing room through a loading dock beneath the building by posing as a food deliverywoman. The spokesman stated that Ms. Sinclair had obtained blueprints of the Hart Office Building and was familiar with them.
German Plot Revealed
The would-be assailant, a former East German citizen identified as Josef Peters, was reported to be an ex-employee of the former East German secret intelligence service, the Stasi. According to intelligence sources, Peters was the true identity of a well-known journalist named Miles Preston, who claimed to be a resident of Great Britain. The place of birth listed on Miles Preston’s passport is Bristol, England, but Bristol city officials have been unable to locate any birth record of a Miles Preston. Little is known about Josef Peters at the present time.
As for Alexander Truslow, Mr. Sinclair’s successor as Director of Central Intelligence, he remains in prison awaiting his treason trial in Washington Superior Court next month. The firm which he founded, Truslow Associates, Inc., has been charged with complicity in Mr. Truslow’s alleged treason, and has been shut down by government authorities pending further resolution of the matter.
The German government of Chancellor Wilhelm Vogel has resigned, and the heads of six German corporations, most prominent among them Gerhard Stoessel, the chairman of the Neue Welt real estate holding firm based in Munich, have been indicted and are facing trial.
Mr. Sinclair had charged that, with the assistance of CIA Director Truslow, Chancellor Vogel and his backers engineered this fall’s German stock market crash in order to gain election, after which they planned a corporate coup d’état of the German government and the establishment of hegemony over Europe. Whatever the truth of the Sinclair revelations, news of the Truslow-Vogel plot shook world governments and markets.
Yet it is still not known whether we have learned the entire story of the CIA conspiracy.
A Packet of Documents
Last week this reporter received by registered mail a
packet of documents prepared and sent by a former CIA officer, James Tobias Thompson III, who died in an accident in his home several days before the events in Washington.
The documents appear to bolster Mr. Sinclair’s claims about Mr. Truslow’s illegal dealings with the German consortium.
But the package, according to postal authorities, appears to have been tampered with. One document referred to in Mr. Thompson’s cover letter concerned a CIA covert program called the “Oracle Project.”
That document, however, was missing from Mr. Thompson’s package. CIA spokesmen deny the existence of any such covert program.
Translated from Tribuno de Siena, p. 22
PUBLIC NOTICE
The Siena City Council welcomes with pleasure the establishment of the Crowell Clinic in the town of Costafabbri, in the Comune of Siena. The Crowell Clinic, a free medical clinic for children, is being run under the guidance of three new arrivals to the Siena area from the United States: Mr. Alan Crowell; his wife, Dr. Carol Crowell, who has an infant daughter, and Dr. Crowell’s father, Richard Hale.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although the Oracle Project is fictional, this story is based on a number of intriguing, little-known historical facts. That a fortune in Soviet gold remains missing to this day is, according to reliable sources, a matter of record in international intelligence and finance circles. And the interest of the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Department of Defense, and Soviet intelligence in psychic research has long been documented.
Look for these other novels from
New York Times bestselling author
JOSEPH FINDER
Paranoia
The Moscow Club
Buried Secrets
Vanished
Power Play
Killer Instinct
Company Man
High Crimes
The Zero Hour
From St. Martin’s Paperbacks
Praise for these other novels by New York Times bestselling author Joseph Finder
BURIED SECRETS
“The kind of masterfully crafted, pulse-throbbing popular entertainment that few readers will want to put down.”
—Boston Globe
“A tremendous high-wire act.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Compulsively readable.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Numerous cliff-hangers propel the action at a breakneck pace … outstanding [and] engrossing.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Racing alongside Nick Heller, you’ll want one more chapter, then another, and then one more.”
—The Washington Post
THE ZERO HOUR
“Thrilling.”
—New Yorker
“Breathlessly exciting.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A labyrinth of suspense … brilliant … a master storyteller.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A thinking person’s thriller with bite.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
HIGH CRIMES
“Fast and furious.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Exciting … deliciously absorbing … full of hairpin turns.”
—The Washington Post
“A powerhouse tale.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Provocative and chilling.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Rattling good entertainment.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
VANISHED
“If Jack Reacher met Nick Heller in a dark alley, my money’s on Reacher. But it would be ugly. Or would it? Actually, I think they’d go for a beer together and set the world to rights—because Joseph Finder has given me a terrific new hero to root for. This is an action-packed, full-throttle, buy-it-today-read-it-tonight series that you definitely shouldn’t miss.”
—Lee Child
“A humdinger … a thriller to enjoy for its Washington locales, convincing familiarity with cutting-edge spy gadgetry, and taut action scenes.”
—The Washington Post
“Cliff-hangers galore, the fascinating tradecraft of corporate espionage, and an engrossing story will propel readers through this outstanding thriller. Highly recommended as a great summer read.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Written in staccato chapters that are emotionally supercharged and action-packed, this thriller will more than satisfy adrenaline junkies and have them guessing until the very end.”
—Publishers Weekly
“If you only read one book this summer, make it Vanished.”
—Crimespree magazine
“Moves at the pace of an injected neurotoxin … You’ll curse Finder for keeping you up into the early hours.”
—Shots magazine
“Even though I’d been warned that everyone who’d read it did so in one sitting, I cracked the cover at 10 p.m., figuring yeah, yeah, one sitting, right. When I passed out at 4 a.m., I was thinking, boy, if I could just keep my eyes open long enough to finish this!”
—Myles Knapp, Contra Costa Times
PARANOIA
“A high-octane thrill ride.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Jet-propelled … this twisting, stealthily plotted story … weaves a tangled and ingeniously enveloping web … [with a] killer twist for the end.”
—The New York Times
“A terrific tale … riveting.”
—USA Today
“Nail-biting suspense.”
—Dallas Morning News
“The most entertaining thriller of the year.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Riveting … perhaps the finest of the contemporary thriller novelists, you may think you’ve read one mystery too many. Find Finder and you’ll think again.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Page-turning perfection … Finder has that rare knack for instantly pulling the reader into the story and then tops that with surprises within surprises.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Imaginative and original, this is a gripping thriller with three characteristics too rare in the genre: humor, heart, and good writing.”
—Detroit Free Press
Praise for
EXTRAORDINARY POWERS
“Finder invents a credibly intelligent and complex protagonist … and plunges him into a dazzlingly labyrinthine adventure … Precise, crackling, tonally perfect prose.”
—USA Today
“A spectacular novel of international intrigue and teeth-grinding suspense … The action is unrelenting.… Electrifying.”
—Boston Sunday Herald
“Gripping drama in which nothing is quite what it seems.”
—Seattle Times
“An extraordinary, powerful book … ingeniously plotted, fast-paced, and frighteningly credible.”
—Nelson DeMille
“It’s a humdinger—John le Carré meets Stephen King!”
—Ira Levin
“Finder winds his tale tighter and tighter as mystery is piled on mystery, intrigue on intrigue.”
—Clive Cussler
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
EXTRAORDINARY POWERS
Copyright © 1993 by Joseph Finder.
All rights reserved. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-22127
ISBN: 978-0-312-93491-0
Ballantine Books edition / February 1994
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / January 2014
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
eISBN 9781466837041
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Extraordinary Powers Page 47