The Second Horseman - Tapa dura

"* 'If you haven't read Kyle Mills yet you should - I do' - Tom Clancy * 'Lead character Salam Al Fayed - 'Fade' - is a first-ballot certainty for the Thriller Hall of Fame.' - Lee Child * 'In the world of political thrillers, I have the feeling that young Kyle Mills will soon be a very big player' - Frederick Forsyth * 'Frighteningly real and powerful' - Gayle Lynds, author of The Coil, on FADE"

Brandon Vale is a career thief -- the best there is. He's never been caught, never plans to be. Of course, there's the little problem of his serving out a prison term for a robbery gone bad -- one that he didn't commit. Then, one night, he is broken out of prison against his will by Richard Scanlon, the former FBI agent who framed him in the first place.Scanlon, who still has ties to the U.S. intelligence community, has discovered that a Ukrainian crime organization is auctioning twelve nuclear warheads to the highest bidder, but he can't convince the government that the sale isn't a hoax. The only way he can get his hands on the money is to arrange for Brandon to steal the $250 million necessary to take the warheads off the market.Not that Brandon has much choice in the matter -- it's either do it or go back to jail with the added years of a failed "escape" tacked on to his sentence -- but he decides to get the cash by pulling off the heist he had been planning when he and Scanlon first met: hijacking the trucks that drive the casinos' cash out of Las Vegas once a week.As the day of the warhead sale approaches, though, their carefully constructed plan begins to break down, and Brandon starts to suspect that the deal has even higher stakes than he had imagined.