Omicron (An Aristotle Project Thriller)

Donovan Faine has experienced major changes before. The railway crossing death of his father in Chepstow, Wales, when Donovan was a boy. His move with his mother to America, close on the heels of that loss. The death of his cousin shortly afterward. An occupation filled with secrets, and the death of his friend Adrian Traen in the course of that life. The woman he found and lost.

But Donovan's about to experience another change, because he's coming out of retirement. When Alisa Wolfe turns up on his doorstep in Bejorca, Spain, she comes without apologies for the way her relationship with Donovan ended, and she's not asking to return to that relationship. She wants something else, instead.

She wants his help.

In the once-upon-a-time world they functioned in, Donovan and Alisa were intelligence agents from the National Security Agency's Aristotle Project. It was a program of sleepers, twenty-four highly-trained men and women put in place in the Seventies and Eighties, with an activation role as foreign communication, interception, and investigation agents in case of widespread electronic breakdown. But that truly was once upon a time.

Donovan, Alisa, and the others from Aristotle are needed now for another reason – forty percent of American intelligence agents in the field have been compromised, and the pervasiveness and depth of the actions against those personnel suggest more are threatened.

Only Aristotle, an unremembered program from an unremembered time, is pure enough to be unknown. Only Aristotle is pure enough to be safe.

The agents are called up by "Southern Comfort" Jim Carness, a president who seems blissfully uninformed, and by his Director of National Intelligence Palmer Kohl, a man with hidden insecurities that don't stop him from rashly believing he can control the Executive. With the begrudging and disbelieving assistance of Deputy CIA Director Gwen McAllen, the Aristotle agents are sent to find out who's behind the compromises.

Their journey takes them to the old contacts and the old places, as they scramble against time to find out who's responsible, in a fight that pits them against adversaries from the past and the present, and from abroad and at home.

Reinken is also the author of Glass House and of Judgment Day, which Publishers Weekly described as "a nearly seamless medical/legal chiller that’s one slick piece of work."

The ebook edition of Omicron includes the first chapter of The Guardian's Deceit, which is coming soon in ebook.