An Agent's Inbox #41

Hello 

Lilah Kingsley is unfailingly polite, even when she puts lead between the assassin's eyes. With much regret, she decides it would be imprudent to attempt the same against the man who sent the killer--her surrogate father, the president of the United States. 

President Temple wouldn’t be surprised, though. He knows she was responsible for the death of the criminal who kidnapped her and her best friend Harry when they were teenagers. Harry had insisted on taking the blame for it, and Temple had kept their secret. It would be five years before she understood why. As an heiress with connections to two of the world's biggest oil companies, Lilah is the linchpin of Temple's scheme to control the energy sector. Unfortunately, by the time she figures it out, she has already lost to Temple's influence the man she'd planned a future with: Harry. 

But Lilah will not let President Temple dictate the operations of the oil cartel built on her sacrifices. When she chucked aside her Harvard law degree to create the consortium, she'd decided she would be no one’s puppet. Not the president’s and especially not Harry’s though he controls one-third of the votes. 

Forced to work with her treasonous lover, hating and needing with equal passion, she is confronted by the discovery that Temple's assassin was targeting Harry, not her. Endure, expose, or execute? If Lilah cooperates with the president and agrees to be a rubber-stamp ruler, she can save Harry's life. She can, of course, expose the president and let the cartel disintegrate. Or she can put her own bullet through Harry's heart.

At 108,000 words, The Insurrection is an epic thriller spanning the tumultuous seventies and eighties. An excerpt is pasted below.

Sincerely,
J.P.

THE INSURRECTION

January 1974

Egypt-Libya border

The blades of the search-and-rescue helicopter cut through salty air one thousand feet above the Mediterranean. The steep escarpment came into Temple’s view, sparse vegetation between ridges. His headset sputtered over the roar of the engines.

“Senator,” said the pilot, “I think that’s Lilah.” 

Fingers clenched around the doorframe, Temple leaned into the wind and surveyed the scene below. Vehicles bound for Alexandria were stalled on the hilly pass by Gaddafi’s border patrol. The soldiers had separated the men from the women, holding them at gunpoint away from the caravan. Temple strained to spot the girl. “Where?” he shouted into the mouthpiece, blinking away gritty sand.

“Not with the crowd, sir. Check the port side,” the pilot said. “Look for yellow clothes.”

There. A figure running between boulders, her robes fluttering behind. Lilah was a couple of hundred feet from the group under inspection, concealing herself behind the limestone formations. She looked up at the chopper before plastering herself to the side of a rock. After weeks of reconnaissance, they’d located one of the abducted teenagers, the daughter of the late ambassador. “She’s hiding from the border patrol,” Temple muttered. “What about the boy? There were two kids.”

“Probably with the caravan. Let me--” The pilot stopped to curse. “We have a problem, Senator.”

One of the soldiers had detached himself from his team to follow Lilah. If she got caught, there was little a single search-and-rescue chopper could do to help. Temple grabbed the AK-47.