Southeast Asia. October 2027.
Kuala Lumpur. Singapore. Bangkok. Three cities. Three methodologies. Same operator.
Seventeen years after four children of the Vladivostok Accord killed the parents who trained them, Jake Kang runs an Asia-Pacific campaign on the compressed schedule of a former president who has decided the last coordinators die this year. A pistol at eighteen inches in a Bukit Bintang serviced apartment. A rifle across West Coast Park. A blade in a Bangkok alley off the strait Singapore glittered across. The Foundation's campaign runs cleaner than anything the team has put on the ground, and everyone in the room feels it.
In Denver, Special Agent Kerrie Fisher of the FBI Counterintelligence Division walks into a conference room with a corkboard and a Morrison mug — and walks out with a twenty-seven-year confession from a former Senate staffer no one believed would ever break. The prosecutable federal case that could unmake Eva Richter has a name now. And a signature.
And in an alley off the Chow Kit market before dawn, Eva Richter's half-sister — a GRU-trained analyst who left the service, chose independence, and has been circling the Foundation for two years — chooses a corridor and holds it beside her against a consortium tactical team. Two daughters of Franz Richter. Back-to-back. Neither one moving like she needs the other. Both of them doing.
The catalyst is not the campaign.
The catalyst is what arrives seven weeks later, when Alina Zhukova finishes reading fourteen pages her father wrote in 2009 and never delivered — and at morning local time, from a rental apartment in Ho Chi Minh City she paid for in cash, sends seven words directly to Alex Popov. Bypassing his handler. Bypassing the Foundation. Bypassing every layer of authority Eva Richter has been operating behind since November 15, 2010.
Some deliveries are more dangerous than the weapons that build the case.
Book Nine of THE SLEEPER NETWORK. A ten-book espionage arc about four assets built by four families to run a program, the pact they made in a Washington hotel suite in November 2010, and the seventeen years they have spent since taking that program apart. The Catalyst is the setup. The Revelations is what it detonates later.
Genre: Thriller
Used availability for D Cipher's The Catalyst