"Strangers Fates"

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An intellectual thriller. A man wakes on a crowded square in a city he cannot name, in a country he cannot name, with no memory of his own face. Thousands of people are running past him in every direction. At the center of the square a young man stands very still with a belt of explosives at his waist, and for reasons he will never be able to explain, the man with no memory walks toward him. Afterward he will remember exactly one word. Astat. He is certain that is what they called him. Two days later he is in a cell, and a woman speaks to him through the wall. She has no memory either. She tells him to look at his right shoulder, where a single letter has been burned into the skin with mathematical precision. Hers is a different letter. There are others. By the end of the week he is on trial in Belgrade for the deaths of more than two hundred people in The Hague, accused of synthesizing a chemical agent no laboratory on earth can identify and of financing a campaign of attacks on churches, mosques, synagogues and temples across nine countries. Every one of those scenes was marked with a single painted letter. One of them matches the mark on his shoulder. He cannot remember whether he is innocent. Half a world away, a professor of neuroethics receives a message with no sender and finds something waiting in a locker at the Geneva airport. An Interpol agent pulls him out of the terminal minutes before four armed men reach him. A former defense analyst living quietly in Tasmania opens a letter that arrived four months late, in handwriting he has not seen in twenty years. In an underground laboratory, an intelligence officer fits a cap of neural sensors to a prisoner's head and asks a machine to print whatever is left of his memory. None of them yet understands that they are circling the same thing from different sides. Something moving beneath the Antarctic ice. Something the Pentagon has authorized and cannot acknowledge. Something that has learned to reach inside a human mind and leave the door open behind it. They will find out who they were. That will turn out to be the worst thing that could happen to them. Perfect for readers who enjoy Dan Brown, Blake Crouch, Steve Berry, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. For anyone drawn to intelligent conspiracy thrillers, psychological suspense, and international mysteries where the puzzle is real, the science is disturbingly plausible, and the answer costs more than the question ever did.