Today is release day for The
Annihilation Protocol (on sale August 25; St. Martin's Press),
the latest installment in author Michael Laurence's Extinction
Agenda series
Bestselling author James
Rollins has described the series as “Jack Reacher falling into a plot written
by Dan Brown." The Annihilation Protocol will appeal to
fans of such intriguing authors as Jonathan Maberry, Gregg Hurwitz, and Mark
Greaney.
For centuries, a
mysterious syndicate known as the Thirteen has staged a silent coup,
infiltrating governments and manipulating the course of world events. It’s more
powerful than any nation, deadlier than any army. The time has come for it to
emerge from the shadows and claim the entire world as its own. And only FBI
Special Agent James Mason and his longtime friends stand in its way.
Eight million lives hang
in the balance and their only chance of surviving lies in the hands of Mason,
his old friends, and a new partner he’s not entirely sure he can trust.
Can his team track down a
sinister agent codenamed Scarecrow before toxic gas fills the streets of New
York City, or will the true power pulling the strings from behind the
scenes—the Thirteen—succeed in enacting its genocidal agenda?
With a complex and propulsive
plot that will grip readers from its first pages, The Annihilation
Protocol will have readers clamoring for more Michael Laurence when
they reach the end!
The Annihilation Protocol is available to purchase
at
Just to add to that
tantalizing synopsis, here’s an excerpt for your reading pleasure.
1
Shelter Island, New York
NOVEMBER 27
The man seated at the
Macassar ebony desk was not accustomed to being made to wait. He wore a tie the
color of honey to call attention to his amber eyes and had the silver hair and
aquiline nose of his fore- bears, as evidenced by the gold-framed portraits
hanging in the trompe l’oeil arches. The fireplace behind him cast a flickering
glare upon the Gothic armchairs, bookshelves, and red stag heads staring down
at him from their mounts. The velvet drapes were drawn, stranding shadows as
dark as his mood in the far corners of the room.
He was known as Quintus,
Latin for fifth, an honorific bequeathed to him by his father, although if
everything went according to plan, he would soon assume the mantle of Quartus,
if not higher. Even his esteemed great-grandfather had never aspired to such
heights, and yet here he was on the cusp of elevating the status of his family
name.
For the last hundred
years, the members of Pantheon Maioris Tredecim—literally translated from Latin
as Pantheon Majority Thirteen—had been content in their respective roles,
largely because they had all been in agreement about their vision of the
future. Despite their numeric rankings, their voices had been equal. Decisions affecting
all of them had been made by the majority, and always after considerable
debate. Technology had shrunk the world, though. Gone were the geographic
boundaries that had once defined their empires, blurring borders that had been
carefully negotiated and strictly enforced since the advent of the syndicate
nearly three and a half centuries ago, allowing the more ambitious among them
to discreetly enter industries formerly considered off-limits to all but the
specific member who controlled them, causing fortunes to fluctuate and tensions
to rise.
None of them had
previously contested his ranking, as the wealth and power each honorific
possessed had remained relatively constant. The path to ascension—rising in
rank and stature—had been one that took decades, a combination of careful
long-term planning by one house and a stroke of misfortune for another, and
even then, Quintus was aware of it having happened only a handful of times.
Time had changed that, however. Estates had diminished over time, members had
grown complacent, and power had diffused through lineages that did nothing but
squabble over it. Families were no longer satisfied with maintaining a seat at
the table and conspired to rule it. While there had always been such men, none
of them had ever attempted a coup d’état.
Until now.
Secundus had fired the
first shot in a war that many of them believed had become inevitable. Although
he’d vehemently denied it, his family, through subsequent generations, had
patiently acquired solid minority holdings in critical resources outside of its
designated sphere, resources that would increase exponentially in value after
the coming cataclysm, the Great Culling, the time for which, they all agreed,
was now at hand. While the other twelve argued over the ultimate mechanism by
which they would thin the herd, he’d gambled on releasing one of his minion’s
engineered viruses—the profits from the fallout would have easily doubled his
already considerable estate and elevated him to Primus—and lost. In doing so,
he’d not only risked exposing the entire organization; he’d altered its
dynamics by sowing the seeds of distrust and instigating what Quintus
speculated would become a thirteen-way free-for-all for supremacy that each
could blame one of the others for starting.
He’d spent his entire life
preparing for this opportunity, though. As his father and grandfather had
before him. And now, with Seconds’ failure to unleash his pandemic, his
position was ripe for the taking.
Tertius and Quartus were
undoubtedly already implementing the machinations of their ascension and
Quintus’s rise was by no means guaran- teed, which meant he needed to succeed
where Secundus had failed, and his entire plan hinged upon the man who had
already missed the prearranged starting time of their virtual meeting.
His laptop chimed to
announce the arrival of an external user to his secure virtual conference room.
The screen remained black for several moments before the shadowed form of a man
drew contrast from the darkness. He wore a sugegasa, a conical Asian hat woven
from straw. It was frayed around the brim and concealed the upper two-thirds of
his face. Only the lobes of his ears, the tip of his nose, and his effeminate
mouth and chin were visible above his slender neck and narrow shoulders.
“You’re late,” Quintus said.
The man made no reply. He
rarely spoke, for reasons that were obvious to anyone who’d ever heard the
sound of his voice.
“I trust you had no
trouble relocating my cache.” The man offered a nearly imperceptible nod. “Then
I assume we’re still on schedule.”
Again, a slight dip of the
chin.
“You know why I called
this meeting. Are you prepared to commence?”
A faint shake of the head.
“Must I remind you that
the remainder of your payment is contingent upon the successful demonstration
of the efficacy of the product?” The sound of breathing from the speakers
became agitated. Quintus intuited the man’s question.
“You want to know what
happened to the team at the slaughter- house.”
The man nodded.
“Let’s just say that no
one who knew you were there is in any kind of condition to share that
information.”
The man made no
appreciable movement.
“I’ve reviewed the
forensics reports myself. The containment tanks were pulverized and buried
under tons of burning rubble when the roof collapsed, and the gas chromatograph-mass
spectrometer failed to detect the presence of any of the precursor chemicals.
Everyone with working knowledge of the experimentation is dead. No one has any
idea you were ever there.”
The man’s lips tightened.
“As far as the Thirteen
are concerned, you were only there for your experience in bioengineering, to
help incorporate that infernal bacterium into the Hoyl’s virus. None of them
has the slightest idea of what you were working on for me. Or what I intend to
do with it. Trust me when I say that if they did, we’d both already be dead or
spending what little time we have left on the run, like Secundus.”
The man’s facial
expression remained unchanged.
Quintus felt a surge of
anger. He was in charge. The man on the screen was his subordinate and in no
position to dictate the direction of this meeting. The hardest part of his job
was already done. Anyone could finish it from here for a fraction of the cost.
He should just con- sider himself fortunate that Quintus hadn’t already had him
killed.
“The Hoyl is dead. His men
are dead. Your lab was sanitized before the entire building was incinerated.
Any residual traces of the chemicals burned off in the fire. The other twelve
in the pantheon are oblivious. My assistant and I are the only two people alive
who know what you were doing there.”
A knock on his office
door. There was only one person who would have dared to interrupt him. He
pressed the button underneath his desktop and the lock disengaged.
The door opened inward and
a hulking silhouette entered from the anteroom. While Marshall was technically
his personal assistant, he hadn’t been hired for his secretarial skills. The
former U.S. Navy SEAL was the team leader of his personal security detail,
which formed a veritable special ops team at his command, day and night. He
stood close to seven feet tall and looked like he’d been chiseled from a
mountain. His buzz cut was flat, his face angular, and his chest muscular
enough to absorb a shotgun blast.
“This arrived at the
gate.” He carried a rectangular box in his mas- sive hands. “The guy who
dropped it off claimed he was given fifty dollars to deliver it to this
address. He was told we’d be expecting it.”
An unsettling smile
appeared from the shadows beneath the brim of the man’s triangular hat on the
monitor. Quintus glanced up at his assistant, who confirmed his suspicion with
a nod.
“What’s in the box?” he
asked.
The man’s smile widened
and revealed his teeth all the way back to his molars.
It appeared to be an
ordinary cardboard box with Japanese char- acters scrawled on the top. Quintus
recognized them. He knew exactly what they meant.
“I demand an answer,” he
said. “What’s in the box?”
The man’s smile didn’t
falter. He made a rolling gesture with his delicate hand.
Quintus nodded to
Marshall, who grabbed the box and walked halfway across the room with it.
“Carefully,” he said to
Marshall.
His assistant removed a
knife from beneath his jacket and slit the tape. Lifted an edge. Tried to see
inside. Cautiously raised the opposite flap. He appeared genuinely confused
until his eyes suddenly widened and locked onto his employer’s.
“What is it?” Quintus
asked.
Marshall reached inside,
pulled out a gas mask, and let the box fall to the floor. The color drained
from his face.
Quintus glanced at the
empty box on the floor. There wasn’t a second mask.
“Give it to me!” he
shouted. “Hurry!”
Marshall looked at the gas
mask, then at Quintus, and then at the gas mask again.
The man on the screen
started to laugh. It was a horrible sound, like a wet, rasping cough.
“I order you to give it to
me!”
His most trusted
confidant, the man who had sworn to protect his life, met his stare.
Marshall’s free hand
clenched into a fist. He bared his teeth and released a humming noise from deep
in his chest. Took several deep breaths.
“I’ve seen what it does,”
he said. “How it kills. The pain. Jesus Christ.
I can’t . . . I’m sorry.”
He quickly donned the gas
mask.
“You can’t do this to me!”
Quintus shouted at the laptop monitor. “Do you have any idea who I am? The
other twelve will scour the globe to find you. And when they do, you will be
subjected to suffering beyond any the world has ever known. You and everyone
you hold dear.”
The man on the screen
continued to make that awful laughing sound.
Marshall stiffened.
Sputtered. His eyes widened. Filled with tears. His pupils shrank to pinpricks.
He coughed. Grabbed his chest. Tore at his shirt. Vomited into the mask.
Quintus looked at the man
on the computer screen, whose laughter abruptly ceased.
Marshall collapsed to the
floor. Started to convulse. Flopped onto his back. Gasped. Choked. His entire
body clenched, then went limp. He issued a hissing sound that freckled the
inside of the visor with blood as his chest deflated.
It didn’t rise again.
That had been the promised
demonstration.
The Novichok agent had
been inside the gas mask, presumably within the canister filter itself.
Less than thirty seconds.
Start to finish.
Had Quintus opened the
box, there was no doubt in his mind that he would have put on the gas mask. The
man on the screen had gambled that his hired hand would betray him and, in
doing so, eliminated the only other person who could connect either of them to
the slaughterhouse.
When the man finally
spoke, it was in a gravelly voice. His cadence was strange, halting. He had to
take deep breaths between words.
“I trust . . . you . . .
approve.”
Quintus walked around his
desk and stood over Marshall, whose blood and vomit concealed his face. Like
the gas itself, they were completely contained inside the mask. The formerly
imposing figure was now little more than a useless mound of flesh.
He was going to need a new
assistant.
“Yes,” he said. “I believe
that will work just fine.”
When he returned to the
laptop, the man was already gone.
Meet
the Author
 |
| Author Michael Laurence, photo by Bryan Grant |
Michael Laurence was born in Colorado
Springs, Colorado to an engineer and a teacher, who kindled his passions for
science and history. He studied biology and creative writing at the University
of Colorado and holds multiple advanced certifications in medical imaging.
Before becoming a
full-time author, he worked as an x-ray/CT/MRI technologist and clinical
instructor. He lives in suburban Denver with his wife, four children, and a
couple of crazy Labrador Retrievers.
Thanks so much for
stopping by today. I hope you enjoyed the excerpt. Doesn’t this sound like a
book that would keep you on the edge of your seat wondering what could happen
next?
