by Sean McFate
“We have big plans for you,” Kabir muttered to the new king’s son.
The new king was already old and ill. The young prince was in his early thirties, an infant by Saudi royal standards, ambitious and malleable. Kabir would convince him to break up Saudi Aramco, the massive state-owned oil company, even if it took the rest of his career. That was a snap of the fingers in the time line of the House of Walsingham, but it was long enough to change the Kingdom and thus the world.
The news camera panned across the doting audience. Kabir didn’t notice Prince Abdulaziz standing on the periphery, in the shadows. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have recognized his old business partner. The two had never met. That was Brad Winters’s job, and he botched it, royally.
Kabir pressed a button, and the monitor retracted behind the bookcases. The fire crackled. His protégé entered the office, as if by telepathic command.
“Yes sir,” the young man said.
“Courier these letters to Paris, Rome, Frankfurt, and Istanbul. Immediately.”
“Very good, sir.” The young man retrieved the envelopes and walked out the pocket doors. Outside, he passed two burly men in suits and earpieces, each holding a Heckler & Koch MP5SD submachine gun with built-in silencer.
He walked down the hallway, passing two more sentries, then downstairs. Another armed man stood near the antique grandfather clock. The young banker-in-training nodded at him, but the guard remained as stone.
Two framed notices were posted in the staff room, where only guard-mercenaries like that man would see them. The first bore the headline apprehend immediately and showed two photographs of Brad Winters.
The second had the headline warning in red block letters. Beneath were two pictures of Tom Locke, a physical description, and the instructions kill on sight.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to acknowledge my friends in the Middle East and Washington, DC, who helped clarify some of the details and geopolitics. My profound thanks to David Highfill and the William Morrow team.
About the Authors
SEAN McFATE is a professor of strategy at the National Defense University and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank. He served as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and then worked for a major private military corporation, where he ran operations similar to those in this book. He is the author of The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order, and holds a BA from Brown University, an MA from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He lives with his wife in Washington, DC.
BRET WITTER has coauthored eight New York Times bestsellers, including the #1 bestseller The Monuments Men. He lives with his family in Decatur, Georgia.
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Also by Sean McFate and Bret Witter
Shadow War
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
deep black. Copyright © 2017 by Sean McFate and Bret Witter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Richard Yoo
Cover photograph: © Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images
Photo credit: John Greim/REX/Shutterstock
first edition
Digital Edition AUGUST 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-240375-9
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-240373-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McFate, Sean, author. | Witter, Bret, author.
Deep black : a Tom Locke novel / Sean McFate and Bret Witter.
First edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, an imprint of
HarperCollins Publishers, [2017]
LCCN 2016053387 (print) | LCCN 2017000659 (ebook) | ISBN
9780062403735 (hardcover) | ISBN 0062403737 (hardcover) | ISBN
9780062403759 (eBook) | ISBN 0062403753 (eBook)
LCSH: Missing persons--Investigation--Fiction. | Tracking and
trailing--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / War & Military. | GSAFD: Suspense
fiction. | War stories.
LCC PS3613.C43965 D44 2017 (print) | LCC PS3613.C43965
(ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053387
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