Perception manager Dick Pender is asked by arms dealer Nicolas Creel to create a lie that will convince the world it is on the brink of war, and sets in motion a chain of events that will link three strangers and bring the world to the edge of destruction.

Former CIA assassin Oliver Stone, having assassinated the two men who were responsible for the death of his wife and being hunted by friends and enemies, finds himself embroiled in the secrets of a small Virginia mining town and falling for a widow.

Twin boys Harry and Max Kelso are separated at the age of twelve when their parents divorce, leaving Harry in the U.S. with his father and sending Max to live in Germany with his mother, but the two meet again in the early days of World War II, this time as pilots on opposite sides of the conflict.

"The new Sean Dillon novel, a knife-edge story of terrorism and revenge, by "the dean of intrigue novelists" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). "The bell tolls at midnight as death requires it." In Washington, D.C., on a night full of rain, a woman is struck down and killed by a hit-and-run driver. But she is not just any woman--she is the assistant to the head of the secret White House department known only as the Basement. And she had secrets of her own....

Jack Ryan, having jumped at the offer to join the CIA as a freelance analyst in the early 1980s, quickly finds himself in over his head when he uncovers a KGB plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II.