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Rules of Vengeance (Jonathon Ransom series Book 2) Kindle Edition
Months after foiling an international terrorist attack, Doctors Without Borders physician Jonathan Ransom is working under an assumed name in a remote corner of Africa. His wife, Emma, desperate to escape the wrath of Division, the secret American intelligence agency she betrayed, has been in hiding. Both look forward to sharing a stolen weekend in London—until a terrorist attack ruins their romantic rendezvous. In the aftermath, Emma disappears and Jonathan is apprehended by the police and threatened, unless he helps secure his wife’s capture. He embarks on a breathless chase across Europe, searching for Emma, and keeping Division at bay . . . until he realizes that all along he’s been a pawn in a high-stakes game of international intrigue far beyond his imagining.
Follow the Rules:
Don't miss Christopher Reich's new thriller, Rules of Betrayal, coming in hardcover in July. The first novel in the series, Rules of Deception, is available now in paperback.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAnchor
- Publication dateJuly 13, 2009
- File size2130 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Vince Flynn is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of nine previous thrillers, including Consent to Kill, Act of Treason, and Protect and Defend. He lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and three children. Read his guest review of Christopher Reich's Rules of Vengeance:
Last summer, before I picked up Christopher Reich’s Rules of Deception, I’d heard it was the kind of smart, high-octane international thriller that would take me back to tales of espionage and political intrigue written by the masters—like Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, and Robert Ludlum. Those books were propulsive mixes of fact and fiction, set in a combustible, all-too-real world where peace balanced on a razor’s edge and nuclear annihilation was a single bullet away. The best of them, like Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol and Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity, left you wondering if they might, in fact, be true. Might something like this really happen?
Then came the 1990’s. The Iron Curtain fell. Russia imploded. And Japan suffered a severe economic crisis. The world was left with America as its sole superpower. The bomb had been defused. We felt safe. And so ended the domination of international espionage blockbusters on the bestseller lists.
Along came Rules of Deception. Was it really a return to the big blockbuster of the 70’s and 80’s? Critics certainly were embracing it with gusto. So it was with some excitement and no small amount of skepticism that I picked up the book. The story started like a rocket and picked up speed from there. By page 20, I knew the critics had gotten it right. Rules of Deception was the very definition of a blockbuster: a lone, intrepid hero battling immense odds to save the world from a cataclysmic battle while also regaining the love of a fallen woman.
Now, Reich gives us Rules of Vengeance. Sequels are rarely as good as the original, so again, I was skeptical. And yet, Rules of Vengeance turns out to be that rare exception—where the novel not only stands up to its predecessor, but actually takes the story and characters in new—and completely surprising—directions. Again we meet Dr. Jonathan Ransom, a surgeon for Doctors Without Borders. The story begins with his arrival in London to deliver an address at a prestigious international medical conference, and it takes off from there at mach speed, offering more twists than the Monaco Grand Prix. I’m not going to give away any of the unexpected plot turns (and there are many), but I will say that once again, Ransom quickly finds himself in trouble not of his own making. And, once again, he is forced to maneuver between the good guys and the bad guys in order to figure out just what he’s been pulled into, and then make sure that no one else suffers because of it. The stakes are sky high. The locales are exotic. The plot is ripped from tomorrow’s headlines and Reich controls the story with a deft hand from beginning to end.
What’s particularly appealing about Jonathan Ransom is he is not a spy or a trained assassin. He is, in fact, the opposite: a doctor who has devoted his life to helping others—a loner working outside political boundaries who exemplifies the best in us all. But like each of us, he has a dark side that is both frightening and compelling. You do not want to make this man angry.
As for Christopher Reich, he—like Ransom—also may not be a trained spy or assassin (at least not to the best of my knowledge). But he certainly does manipulate the twists, summon the adrenaline, and create a landscape of thrills that can only leave readers with one lasting impression: Chris Reich is the real deal. —Vince Flynn
(Photo © Peter Hurley)From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“The stakes are sky high. The locales are exotic. The plot is ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.” —Vince Flynn
“Stellar. . . . A blinding twist at the end adds a spectacular fillip to a masterful performance by one of the genre’s elite.” —Publishers Weekly
“Jonathan Ransom has all the makings of a Hitchcock hero.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Christopher Reich is one of my favorite suspense writers.” —James Patterson
“Christopher Reich is at the top of his game.” —David Baldacci
“Christopher Reich is one of my favorite suspense writers and he’s outdone himself this time.” —James Patterson
“Christopher Reich is the master of the espionage thriller for the 21st century.” —Clive Cussler
From the Paperback edition.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
The most expensive real estate in the world is located in the district of Mayfair in central London. Barely two square miles, Mayfair is bordered by Hyde Park to the west and Green Park to the south. Claridge's Hotel, the world headquarters of Royal Dutch Shell, and the summer residence of the sultan of Brunei are within walking distance of one another. In between can be found many of the world's best-known luxury boutiques, London's only three-star restaurant (as awarded by the Guide Michelin), and a handful of art galleries catering to those with unlimited bank accounts. Yet even within this enclave of wealth and privilege, one address stands above the rest.
1 Park Lane, or "One Park" as it's commonly known, is a luxury residential high-rise located at the southeast corner of Hyde Park. It began life one hundred years ago as a modest ten-story hotel and over time has served as a bank, a car dealership, and, it is rumored, a high-class brothel for visiting Middle Eastern dignitaries. As real estate values began to spiral upward, so did the building's aspirations.
Today, One Park stands some twenty stories tall and is home to nineteen private residences. Each occupies an entire floor, not counting the penthouse, which is a duplex. Prices start at five thousand pounds, or a breath under eight thousand dollars, per square foot. The cheapest residence goes for 15 million pounds; the penthouse, four times that, 60 million pounds, or nearly 90 million dollars. Owners include a former British prime minister, an American hedge-fund manager, and the purported leader of the Bulgarian underworld. The joke around the building is who among them is the biggest thief.
With so much wealth gathered beneath one roof, security is a twenty-four-hour concern. At all times, two liveried doormen cover the lobby, a team of three plainclothes officers roams the premises, and two more occupy the control room, where they keep a constant eye on the multiplex of video monitors broadcasting live feeds from the building's forty-four closed-circuit television cameras.
One Park's imposing front doors are made from double-paned bulletproof glass, protected by a steel grate and secured by magnetic lock. The doors' German manufacturer, Siegfried & Stein, guaranteed the lock against a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade. The front doors might be blown clear off their hinges and across the spacious marble lobby, but by God and Bismarck, they will remain locked. Visitors are granted entry only after their faces have been scrutinized via closed-circuit television and their identity confirmed by a resident.
For all intents and purposes, One Park is impregnable.
Getting in was the easy part.
The trespasser, operational designation "Alpha," stood inside the master bedroom closet of residence 5A of 1 Park Lane. Alpha was familiar with the apartment's security system. Prior reconnaissance had revealed the presence of pressure pads beneath the carpet alongside the windows in every room and at the front entry, but none in the closet. There were other, more sophisticated measures, but they, too, could be defeated.
The intruder crossed to the door and flipped the light switch. The closet was palatial. A shoe rack stood against the far wall, and next to it a rolled-up flag of St. George and two Holland & Holland shotguns. The owner's clothing hung along one wall. There was no women's clothing to be seen. The residence belonged to a bachelor.
To the left were stacks of yellowing periodicals, bound newspapers, and manila files, the meticulously accumulated bric-a-brac of a dedicated scholar. To the right stood a mahogany dresser with several photographs in sterling frames. One showed a fit, sandy-haired man in hunting attire, shotgun under one arm, in conversation with a similarly sporty Queen Elizabeth II. The trespasser recognized the owner of the apartment. He was Lord Robert Russell, only son of the duke of Suffolk, England's richest peer, with a fortune estimated at five billion pounds.
Alpha had not come to steal Russell's money, but for something infinitely more valuable.
Kneeling, the intruder removed a slim packet from a work bag. A thumbnail punctured its plastic wrapping. Alpha deftly unfolded a foil-colored jumpsuit and stepped into it. Care was taken to ensure that the suit covered every square inch of exposed skin. A hood descended low over the brow and rose over the jaw to mask the nose and mouth. The jumpsuit was made from Mylar, a material often used for survival blankets. The suit had been designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to prevent the escape of the body's ambient heat.
Satisfied that the Mylar suit was in place, the intruder removed a pair of telescopic night-vision goggles and affixed them comfortably, again working to cover as much skin as possible. A pair of gloves came last.
Alpha cracked open the closet door. The master bedroom was cloaked in darkness. A scan of the area revealed a motion detector attached to the ceiling near the door. The size of a pack of cigarettes, the motion detector emitted passive infrared beams capable of detecting minute oscillations in room temperature caused by the passage of human bodies through a protected space. The alarm's sensitivity could be calibrated to allow a cat or a small dog free rein of the premises without triggering the alarm, but Robert Russell did not own a house pet. Moreover, he was cautious by nature and paranoid by dint of his profession. He knew full well that his recent work had made him unpopular in certain circles. He also knew that if the past were to be taken as an indication, his life was in danger. The sensors would be set to detect the faintest sign of an intruder.
Even with the thermal suit, it was not yet safe to enter the room. Robert Russell had equipped his flat with a double-redundant security system. The motion detector constituted one measure. The other was a microwave transmitter that relied on the concept of Doppler radar to bounce sound waves off the walls. Any disturbance in the sound waves' pattern would activate the alarm.
A survey of the bedroom failed to locate the transmitter.
Just then a voice sounded in Alpha's earpiece. "He's leaving the target. You have eight minutes."
"Check."
Stepping out of the closet, Alpha moved swiftly to the bedroom door. No alarm sounded. No air horn. No bell. There was no microwave transmitter in the room. The bedroom door stood ajar, granting a clear view down a hallway and into the living area. Gloved fingers increased the night-vision goggles' magnification fourfold. It required fifteen seconds to locate the ruby-red diode high on the foyer wall that signaled the location of the transmitter. There was no way to disable the diode. The solution lay in tricking it into thinking it was operating normally.
Drawing a miniature target pistol from the jumpsuit, Alpha took careful aim at the diode and fired. The pistol did not shoot a bullet--at least, not in the conventional sense of the word. Instead it launched a subsonic projectile containing a crystalline epoxy compound. Designed to flatten on impact, the epoxy would effectively block the sound waves and reflect them back to the transmitter. Still, for less than a second, the sound waves would be disturbed. The alarm would be triggered.
But there it would end.
The beauty and the arrogance of the double-blind alarm lay in the necessity to trigger both mechanisms at the same time in order to activate the alarm. If the thermal sensor detected a rise in temperature, it would cross-check with the motion detector for a corresponding disruption in the Doppler waves. Similarly, if the Doppler-based motion sensor was disturbed, it would verify with the thermal sensor that there had been an increase in room temperature. If in either case the response was negative, the alarm would not be activated. The redundancy was not installed to make the room safer, but to guard against the possibility of a false alarm. No one had ever considered it possible to defeat both systems at the same time.
The projectile hit its target dead on. The ruby-red diode vanished. The room was clear.
Alpha checked the time. Six minutes, thirty seconds.
Inside the living room, it was necessary to fold back the carpet from the walls. The pressure pads were located as noted on the schematics. One was placed in front of each of the floor-to-ceiling windows looking over Hyde Park, and the third in front of the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. Each required one minute to disable. There was another near the front door, but Alpha didn't bother with it. The entry and escape routes were the same.
Four minutes.
Free to roam the apartment, the intruder made a beeline for Russell's study. Alpha had been inside the apartment before and had made a point of memorizing its layout. A sleek stainless steel desk occupied the center of the room. On it were three LCD monitors arrayed side by side. A far larger screen, some ninety-six inches across, hung from the wall directly opposite him.
Alpha directed a halogen beam beneath the desk. The computer's central processing unit sat on the floor at the rear of the foot well. There was no time to copy its contents, only to destroy it. Alpha slipped a handheld electronic device from the work bag and swiped it several times over Russell's CPU. The device delivered an immensely powerful electromagnetic pulse, obliterating all data.
Unfortunately, the information was also stored in a more permanent location: Robert Russell's estimable brain.
"He's pulling into the garage," announced the voice in the earpiece.
The time was 2:18 a.m. "Everything's a go," said Alpha. "Get lost."
"See you back at the fort."
On the desk was a web tablet, an all-in-one touch screen that controlled the apartment's automatic functions. With a touch Russell could turn on the television, open or close the curtains, or adjust the temperature. There was another, more interesting feature. If one hit the security button, the screen divided itself into quarters, each showing the view from one of the building's closed-circuit cameras. The top left quadrant showed Robert Russell leaving his car, an Aston Martin DB12. Russell appeared entering the basement foyer a moment later. A few seconds passed and he entered the bottom left quadrant, this time inside the elevator. At thirty, he was tall and lean, with a full head of tousled white-blond hair that drew looks wherever he went. He wore jeans, an open shirt, and a blazer. Somewhere in the past, he'd earned a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. He was a dangerous man in every respect.
He stepped out of the elevator, and a moment later appeared in the final screen, standing inside his private alcove and pressing his pass key and thumb to the biometric lock.
Alpha walked into the kitchen and opened the freezer. On the top shelf were two bottles of vodka sheathed in ice rings. "áZubr—wka," read the labels. Polish vodka made from bison grass. The vodka tasted like warm velvet.
The tumblers to the front door slid back. Robert Russell's heels clicked on the marble floor. The trespasser took off the balaclava, unzipped the jumpsuit, and waited. The disguise was no longer needed. It was essential that Russell not be frightened. His keychain held a panic button that activated the alarm.
Russell walked into the kitchen. "Jesus, you scared the hell out of me," he exclaimed.
"Hello, Robbie. Care for a drink?"
Russell's smile faded rapidly as the facts arranged themselves in his razor-sharp mind. "Actually, just how the hell did you get in here?"
He had barely finished the words when the trespasser, operational designation Alpha, brought the bottle of vodka and its ice sheath down on his skull. Russell collapsed to all fours, the keychain skittering across the floor. The blow left him stunned but not unconscious. Before he could call out, Alpha straddled him, grasped his jaw in one hand, his hair in the other, and wrenched his head violently to the left.
Russell's neck snapped like a rotted branch. He fell limp to the floor.
It took all of Alpha's strength to drag the body across the living room and onto the balcony. Alpha flung his arms over the railing, then grasped Russell's legs, hefted the dead weight, and rolled the body over.
She did not wait to see Lord Robert Henley Russell strike the granite stairs 35 meters below.
2
Kenya Airways Flight 99 inbound from Nairobi touched down at London Heathrow Airport at 0611 British Summer Time. The manifest listed 280 passengers and 16 crew aboard the Airbus A340. In fact, the number was well over 300, with a dozen infants piled on their mothers' laps and a handful of standbys clambering into the fold-down seats meant for flight attendants.
Seated in row 43, Jonathan Ransom checked his watch and shifted uneasily. Flight time had clocked in at exactly nine hours--thirty minutes faster than scheduled. Most passengers were delighted by the early arrival. It meant beating morning rush hour into the city or gaining a head start on the day's sightseeing. Jonathan was not among them. All week departures out of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport had suffered lengthy delays because of an ongoing strike by local air traffic _controllers. The previous day's flight had arrived in London six hours late. The day before that, it had been canceled altogether. Yet his flight had arrived not only on time, but ahead of schedule. He wasn't sure whether it was luck or something else. Something he didn't want to put a name to.
I shouldn't have come, he told himself. I was safe where I was. I should have played it smart and stayed out of sight.
But Jonathan had never ducked a responsibility and he wasn't about to start now. Besides, deep down he knew that if they wanted to find him, there was no place too far away, no spot on the globe too remote where he might hide.
Jonathan Ransom stood a few inches over six feet. Dressed in jeans, chambray shirt, and desert boots, he looked lean and fit. His face was deeply tanned from months of working beneath the equatorial sun. The same sun had chapped his lips and left his nose freckled with pink. His hair was shorn to a soldier's stubble and cut through with gray. His nose was strong and well shaped, and served to focus attention on his dark eyes. With his two-day beard, he could be Italian or Greek. A bolder guess might place him as a South American of European descent. He was none of these. He was American, born in Annapolis, Maryland, thirty-eight years earlier to a distinguished southern family. Even in the narrow seat, he appeared to control his space instead of allowing it to control him.
To channel his nerves, Jonathan gathered up the varied journals, articles, and reviews he'd brought to prepare for the medical congress and tucked them into his satchel. Most had names like "Diagnosis and Prevention of Tropical Infection" or "Hepatitis C in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Clinical Study" and had been written by distinguished physicians at distinguished universities. The last was printed on simple copier paper and carried his own name beneath the title. "Treatment of Parasitic Diseases in Pediatric Patients," by Dr. Jonathan Ransom, MD. FACS. Doctors Without Borders. Instead of a hospital, he listed his current place of work: United Nations Refugee Camp 18, Lake Turkana, Kenya.
For eight years Jonathan had worked for Doctors Without Borders, the humanitarian relief organization dedicated to bringing medical care to areas of acute crisis. He'd taken his skills to Liberia and Darfur, to Kosovo and Iraq, and to a dozen places in between. And for these last six months he'd served as principal physician at the Turkana camp, on the border of Ethiopia and Kenya. The camp's current population numbered upward of one hundred thousand persons. Most had come from the horn of Africa, displaced families fleeing war-ravaged regions in Somalia and Ethiopia. As one of only six physicians at the camp, and the only board-certified surgeon, he spent his time caring for everything from broken ankles to bullet wounds. But this year his crowning glory lay in another department. He'd delivered a hundred babies in 140 days without losing a single one.
At some point along the way, he'd become an expert on parasitic diseases. With the world community paying increasing attention to the problems of disease and poverty in developing nations, doctors with experience "on the front lines" were suddenly in vogue. Early in the spring, he'd received the invitation from the International Association of Internists (IAI) to deliver a paper on the subject at its annual congress. Jonathan did not enjoy public speaking, but he'd accepted all the same. The subject merited wider recognition, and the opportunity to address such an influential body didn't come along often. It was an obligation he couldn't shun. The IAI had paid his fare, booked the flight, and arranged his accommodation. For a few days he'd have a real bed to sleep on, with clean sheets and a firm mattress. He smiled. At the moment, the prospect sounded inviting.
It was then that Jonathan saw the police escorts and his heart did whatever it did when you couldn't catch a breath and you felt paralyzed from the neck down.
Two blue-and-white Rovers belonging to the British Airport Authority drove alongside the aircraft, their strobes lit and spinning. In short order, two more vehicles joined their rank. Jonathan pressed his back against the seat. He'd seen enough.
Emma, he called silently, his heart roaring to life. They've come for me.
Product details
- ASIN : B001NLKY2O
- Publisher : Anchor (July 13, 2009)
- Publication date : July 13, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 2130 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 433 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #45,971 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #343 in Mystery Action Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #394 in Espionage Thrillers (Kindle Store)
- #522 in Assassination Thrillers (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Hi Everyone,
It's great to be part of Amazon's new Author Page. Here's a short bio.
I was born November 12, 1961 in Tokyo, Japan and moved to Los Angeles four years later, in late 1965. I graduated from Harvard School (now Harvard-Westlake) in 1979, then made the move to Washington DC where I attended the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Upon graduating with a degree in international economics (a field in which I was neither particularly gifted nor interested), I worked as a stock broker for two years. One day my best client said, "Chris, you're a nice guy, but you have no idea what you're doing in this business. You might get into trouble one day. You gotta get your butt to business school." I followed his advice and headed down to Austin, Tx, to earn an MBA at UT.
After graduating from UT, I moved even farther east....all the way to Switzerland, where I joined the Union Bank of Switzerland, first in Geneva and then in Zurich. I left banking and worked first as a consultant, and then as the CEO of a small watch company in Neuchatel. The only thing I missed out on was the chocolate business! Anyway, after 7 years in Switzerland, I decided that it was high time to become an author. I'd never written a short story and I hadn't taken a single English class in college. So what? I was a demon reader and I thought for sure I could do. My wonderful wife supported the decision wholeheartedly and we moved back to Austin, where I would write my first novel, Numbered Account.
The rest, as they say, is history....Or, as I say, "history in the making!!"
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Top reviews from the United States
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Good read keeping the reader fully engaged
with the characters as the conflicts develop
I believe there is a lot of realism to the "Rules" series. The books aren't the type where the killer lived in the targets attic for three months and used the target's shower and computer during those months and is so good he goes undetected. Then flys off on his Gulfstream after the deed is done. The C. Reich books will be much more real.
I've recommended the series to friends that have also enjoyed the books.
Jonathan Ransome is at once the unluckiest guy in the world as well as the luckiest. Unlucky to have met and married his wife Emma. Lucky to have survived the process and to have made it through two novels in one piece. (That gives away nothing of the story)
Having discovered that Emma is some kind of a governmental agent in Rules of Deception and accepting that they must be apart for a considerable time due to her activities, Ransome is a member of Doctors Without Borders who has been laboring in the hinterlands of civilization when he is brought to Paris to be the guest speaker at a medical conference.
It is not long after arriving in Paris that he meets up with Emma (as she had planned). However, her idea is for this to be a last farewell. Jonathan has other ideas and for the rest of the book he chases the ellusive Emma across many borders attempting to understand her true identity and prevent her from carrying out a mission that could have serious implications for world peace.
What costs this book a couple of stars for me is the Perils of Pauline nature of Ransome's adventures. Just before the train runs over him as he is tied to the tracks, SHAZAM...he is off in another direction time after time.
I can understand how some might find this to be the way they like a book to go and those that do have given this four and five stars. My wife liked it much more than I. So, either I am being too much of an old codger about this type of writing or perhaps I am on to something. You read it and and you decide. It won't be a waste of your time.
Top reviews from other countries
There were a couple of things in the book where he took liberties, but they were soon forgiven
I enjoyed the book very much.