The Gamma Option (43 page)

Land with street kids in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which he visited in 1987 as part of his research for
The Omicron Legion
(1991).

Land on the beach in Matunuck, Rhode Island, in 2003.

In front of the “process trailer” on the set of
Dirty Deeds
, the first movie that he scripted, which was released in 2005. The film starred Milo Ventimiglia and Lacey Chabert.

Land pictured in 2007 with Fabrizio Boccardi, the Italian investor and entrepreneur who was the inspiration for his book
The Seven Sins
, which was published in 2008.

Land emceeing the Brunch and Bullets Luncheon to benefit Reading Is Fundamental at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in the spring of 2007.

Land and his classmates and fraternity brothers celebrating their thirtieth class reunion during Brown University’s Commencement Weekend in 2009. He was a member of the Delta Phi fraternity.

In the fall of 2010, Land attended the first ever Brown University night football game, which he coordinated in his position as Vice President of the Brown Football Association. Brown beat rival Harvard 29-14.

Land’s most recent publicity shot, taken in late 2010, when he was having, he says, a good hair day.

Acknowledgments

IN EACH SUCCESSIVE BOOK,
the challenge to be accurate in all matters technical becomes greater. Thus, the list of those who provide assistance continues to grow. My apologies to any I have left out in the list that follows.

As always, I must start with a perfectly wondrous agent, Toni Mendez. It was Toni who taught me the importance of finding a great editor and I have been blessed with two: Ann Maurer, and especially Daniel Zitin whose creative genius makes my work better than it has a right to be. The entire Fawcett team headed by Leona Nevler continue to publish people as well as books and the support of that family at all levels is precious to me.

Special thanks on this one to—who else?—Dr. Mort Korn for his help with the extensive biological research and to Dr. Ken Ratzan for helping to turn a concept into a full-fledged idea.

John Signore and especially Emery Pineo continue to red pencil the most ludicrous of my assertions, while first draft reader Tony Shepperd blue pencils the rest.

Thanks to Mark Levine for a great tour of Boston, to Shlomo Giot for showing me an Israel I never dreamed of, to Alan Foster for a great day in London, and Jim Klein for finding Blaine McCracken a place to live in Portland!

Invaluable technical assistance was also rendered by David Schecter, Richard Levy, Jim Ramsey of McDonnell Douglas, and Shihan John Saviano in his usual capacity as choreographer for the many fight sequences.

A special thanks to Manijeh Taleghani and Bob Taleghani for helping me construct the Iranian sequences and to Rob Lewis and the students of Reading School for their hospitality.

And finally my deepest thanks to the First National Company of
Les Miserables
, especially Mark Andrews and Lantz Landry (the best Gavroche of them all), for putting up with me for a dozen performances.

A Sneak Peek at
Strong at the Break

Turn the page for a sneak peek at Jon Land’s new book
Strong at the Break
, coming in 2011

Chapter 1

Quebec; the present

FROM THE STREET THE
house looked like any other nestled around it in the suburban neighborhood dominated by snow cover that had at last started to melt. A McMansion with gables, faux brick and lots of fancy windows that could have been lifted up and dropped just about anywhere. The leaves had long deserted the tree branches, eliminating any privacy for each two-acre spread had the typical neighbors been around to notice. Problem was the neighborhood, part of a new plot of palatial-style homes, had been erected at the peak of a housing boom now gone bust, so less than a third were occupied.

Caitlin Strong and a Royal Canadian Mountie named Pierre Beauchamp were part of a six-person squad rotating shifts in teams of two inside an unsold home diagonally across from the designated 18 Specter, the marijuana grow house they’d been eyeballing for three weeks now. She’d come up here after being selected for a joint U.S. and Canadian Drug Task Force looking into the ever-increasing rash of drug smuggling across a fifteen-mile stretch of St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation land that straddled the border.

Beauchamp lowered his binoculars and made some notes on his pad, while Caitlin looked at him instead of raising hers back up.

“Something wrong, Ranger?”

“Not unless you count the fact I got no idea what we’re trying to accomplish here.”

“Get the lay of the land. Isn’t that it?”

“Seems to me,” Caitlin told the Mountie, “that the DEA got that in hand already. You boys too.”

“It’s Task Force business now. We need to build a case for a full-on strike.”

“You telling me the Mounties couldn’t have done that already, on their own?”

“Not without alerting parties on the other side of border who’d respond by dropping their game off the radar, eh? When we hit them, the effort’s got to be coordinated and sudden. That doesn’t mean two law enforcement bodies working in tandem, it means two
countries
. And that, Ranger Strong, is never a simple prospect.”

“So we’ve got to tell both sides what they know already.”