Marshal Hail is a CEO of a tech company.
He is also an engineering genius, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, and, because the company he heads is his own creation from the ground up and a major success in the industry, he is also a billionaire several times over. Those are the good points of his life.
He is also a man deeply suffering the loss of his family in a terrorist attack which has quite understandably shifted his focus and his drive from running a tech company to leading his people in a new fight against those who murdered his loved ones. That had happened two years before we first meet the 40-year-old Hail and in those twenty-four months, he felt he had aged ten years.
"The man that was looking back at him in the mirror looked fatigued and worn-out, as if he spent much of his time snorting crank or shooting some other destructive drug [which he had not]." "His hair, at one time, had been an attractive shade of light brown, but now it was turning prematurely grey. The lines in his long and strong face, character lines as his wife had referred to them, now appeared to be deep furrows that carved a sorrowful and cross expression into his face."
The tragedy that so changed him had been on a flight back to the States taken by his wife and twin eight-year-old daughters, a trip that had ended in horror due to a terrorist attack and it is now terrorism that is his primary opponent. When a person is a tech genius wealthy enough to hire other tech genius willing and ready to take on such enemies and to fund such a major undertaking, things happen.
Playing a major role in the activities of Hail and his people is Kara Ramey. Unlike Hail, who is obviously not an operative even though he is moving into the cloak and dagger world, Ramey is in fact a trained field agent.
"She was just like all other CIA operatives, except for her undeniable beauty. She, too, had trained at Camp Peary, also known as 'The Farm', and Kara graduated at the top of her class in physical conditioning and vehicle handling. She excelled in firearms, surveillance, interrogation and could dispatch her male counterparts in hand-to-hand combat. She could outshoot and outdrive them."
Where Ramey was so exceptional, though, was in her beauty and in her willingness to use it to achieve her missions. She would at times be called upon to have sex with intended targets. The soon-to-be-eliminated might refer to it as 'making love' but Kara knew "love had nothing to do with it". On those few times she allowed herself to think of it, Ramey doubted she would ever love anyone again, not since her parents died so violently.
Hail and Ramey come from totally different walks of life. They both share one obsession.
Good Lines:
- As the already beautiful Kara was putting on a touch of makeup, it was observed that "adjusting beauty was like trying to determine how shiny the Ferrari had to be. It was subjective."