John Darque is a spymaster.
He is the "director of a clandestine organization inside the US that had the charter of maintaining the balance of power in the world by whatever means he deemed necessary to accomplish that mission.
We get a glimpse of Darque's life many years before he would leave the field work as a trained operative and become the spymaster we know him to be. In that flashback we are taken to the Vietnam War when Darque, along with his close friend Carl, had been one especially feared pair of sniper and spotter, so hated and respected by the enemy that there was a sizable bounty on their heads. It was in that timeframe that he was given the sobriquet of 'Chadeaux' which is French for gifts but is really a play on his last name and the then popular day time gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows.
In that snippet we learn why Darque would acquire a mistrust of some members of the intelligence community when he and Carl are betrayed by a CIA agent. Carl lost his life and Darque lost a year of his life in hospital and saw the trajectory of his future change dramatically.
Now in the present, Darque would prefer to live in the secluded cabin he owned in the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina with his former police K-9, Bill, and the very attractive and very deadly love of his life, Penny. Unfortunately, it seemed before very many days went by from a previous call, the phone would ring with another problem that would demand Darque's attention and he would have to leave the solitude to a commanding role, if not an active one, in another crisis that can only be resolved with the decisiveness of his team.
Good Lines:
- "Darque had never ascribed to the philosophy of 'an eye for an eye'; his had always been 'a life for an eye'.