Krishna
This one is a techno thriller. Boyd mixes technology with a lovely eye for keeping the tension up as the story hurtles at a breathtaking pace and it all stands together. Let us explore the story.
The preface is short.
Hasad Arvadi is dying, being thwarted after coming close to gazing at the ark. He had solved the mystery but was killed when he was close to it. Before he died, he had enough energy to write three lines in a pocket book he had.
Dilara Kenner meets Sam Watson in the LAX airport. A lady cleverly poisons him while pretending to drop her purse and he dies, but not before telling her that he knows that her father, Hasad, was killed after finding the Ark and giving her a lead to follow.
Rex Hayden is a an actor promoting his latest action film. Arrogant, he does not notice when Dan Cutter impersonates the limo driver and adds an extra bag to his private jet. What happens next is incredible. When the jet does not respond to communications, intercepting jets go to meet it in air and they report that the jet is empty without any passengers or even the pilot or co-pilot. They simply seem to have vanished. Finally the jet goes on autopilot as far as it can but crashes into the empty desert in Arizona.
Sebastian Garret of Garret Pharmaceuticals knows that his invention would have a powerful impact due to the demonstration with the jet but unfortunately, instead of crashing into the ocean as originally planned, it crashed into the desert (due to an unexpected delay in starting due to an oil slick on the tarmac). He now asks his capable giant of an assistant, Dan Cutter, to see if he can retrieve the device if it has survived.
Even Dilara, when she phones to let Tyler Locke know that she is coming over to an isolated oil rig in Newfoundland through a helicopter, the only way she can reach the rig, Tyler finds that the helicopter loses its rotor due to an explosion while it tries to land. He, however, saves her and the other people in that helicopter, passengers and crew alike.
When she tries to convince him that the helicopter was tampered with, Tyler is skeptical. He has a friend Grant, who he would trust with his life. When he realizes that the phone lines were cut, he gets Grant help to trap the intruder with a machine gun, who swallows cyanide rather than be captured. They realize that he had also planted three bombs on the rig with a timer.
Racing against time, he manages to find and dispose of these. Now he is convinced that Dilara was telling him the truth.
He learns of the actor’s plane crash, and realizing that his name was one mentioned by Sam, decided to go and investigate. The killers follow their car and wait for them to come out from the office and one of them tries to kill them right in front of the house in broad daylight. Due to a split second advance notice in the reflection in front, Tyler saves himself and Dilara and is shocked when they follow them into the Space Needle, shooting despite the crowd. They manage to get into a departing train but one of them gets in after them and is killed after Tyler was nearly killed. Then they meet the other who had driven to be there before the train stopped and then finally manage to overcome him too. He falls to his death rather than be captured.
Meanwhile, Garrett puts two of the folks who failed in the task set for them to death by the deadly substance which rots the skin and turns everything to skeletons. This was the agent used in Rex Hayden’s plane and Garrett asks Cutter to get the box in the plane before investigators can learn of the agent. We learn that Sam was an employee who got an attack of conscience and tried to turn traitor.
They hear of an engineer who worked on Project Oasis and he and his fellow engineers were killed when an explosive they were setting up exploded prematurely. They meet the daughter who gives them permission to look into his office and they find that anything related to Project Oasis were removed.
Despite Taylor and his buddy Grant’s best efforts, Cutter and another agent manage to get the suitcase in the airplane crash debris taken away from right under the nose of the company security people. Taylor almost got killed trying to stop him and the massacre of the innocent civilians next door in a water part. The book, you realize, is almost non stop action but since it is with the thread of the narrative, it makes for a very entertaining read.
But there is a document that talks about Project Whirlwind, which was an earlier name when Garrett tried to recruit Taylor Locke unsuccessfully.
Having guessed that the ship Genesis Dawn is the next target, Taylor gets himself and Dilara invited onboard and confronts Garrett. He guesses where the attack will be from when he hears Garrett say that he will leave after the night. However, he is escorted by a crooked FBI agent in the pay of Garrett and manages to just escape. However, Dilara is kidnapped by Svetlana and Garrett and taken in a private plane to his hideout Oasis.
Taylor has the suitcase removed from the Dawn ship and has it analyzed. He realizes that it is a derivative of prions, one of the deadly viruses known to man and in a modified form, it simply will melt flesh. Garrett has diluted it to ensure that the passengers carry it with them and spread it all over the world before the virus dies, thus exterminating every one except those who have been safely hidden in a bunker (of Project Oasis). It targets only humans, as the animals are not ‘the cause of the earth’s current corruption’. The allegory to the original Ark is clear. The bunker is the new ark.
Finally Tyler realizes that he needs the help of his hard father – he really does not want to go to him. But go, he does and an army unit is sent with him to the Oasis. A select group of four manages to enter the facility before the alarm is sounded and Dilara coincidentally manages to escape from her place of imprisonment where they are trying to get her to admit all she knows. This sounds simplistic but the action is great to read, and is a non stop adrenaline filled thrill ride.
When they escape and give the control to the army, they realize – too late that Garrett has escaped through a secret passageway via a submarine.
Looking at a clue in the back of her father’s picture in the locket, they locate a map and go to Armenia, under Mt Ararat, to get at the Ark. However, Garrett also arrives there to get at the prions in the ark to make a new batch of virus in a secret Swiss facility that the authorities freezing his assets have not discovered yet.
When Garrett realizes that he does not have the full information for the second amulet with the virus, he decides to watch Locke and Dilara. Those people track the arc to Turkey and they finally realize that the ark is simply a cave and the flood was a virus that dissolved the flesh. They locate the second amulet and Locke takes another prism (to analyze) which does not contain the virus. When cornered by Garrett and Svetlana (with Cutter) after they dispose of the bodyguards who had been stationed at the entrance of the cave, Garrett lets a second’s indecision let Locke escape while Grant tracks Cutter and Svetlana (the latter had gone after Dilara).
How it all ends with multiple near misses is the rest of the story. It is pure entertainment, with enough descriptions thrown in to make it credible and the reader involved. If you do not expect great philosophy (and there is some pop philosophy near the end that does not work) it is a good book to curl up with.
8/10
– – Krishna (Feb 2020)