Böcker av Bill Desmedt

Jonathan Knox is one of the country's most sought-after management consultants, not least for his uncanny skill at intuiting the solution hidden in the noise. Blessing though it may be to his clients, Knox's so-called pattern-matching ability began as a curse, born of a nightmarish long-ago bad trip. Even after all these years flashbacks still haunt his dreams. Or did until recently, when something new came into his life: For, through no fault of his own, Knox has blundered into a relationship with -Marianna Bonaventure, an Energy Department agent charged with keeping track of nuclear proliferation risks … from behind a desk. Her only foray into fieldwork so far was the mission where she first teamed with Jon Knox, the one where they'd … well, between the two of them, they'd sort of saved the world. Now she's on another case with Jon, investigating the disappearance of billionaire Davoud Ansari's daughter Fatimah. It's far less earth-shattering than last time, she thinks, but weird all the same, especially since their co-investigator is -Nietzsche, an artificial intelligence built by Ansari's company, Psyche Industries. Nietzsche may be the first machine in the world to attain consciousness, albeit at a terrible price. But Nietzsche is also a machine with a secret agenda - one involving the kidnapping investigation he is conducting with Knox and Marianna. Yet not even Nietzsche suspects that the real danger will only emerge once they've cracked the case and brought Fatimah safely home.Hamza Nassiri is the author of that danger: A deep-cover agent for Iran's feared Quds Force posing as Psyche Industries' security chief, Hamza is laboring in secret to undermine the MERGE, an intelligence analysis capability of unthinkable power. Before it comes on line, he must use Fatimah Ansari to bring down MERGE and the country along with it.

June 30th, 1908 - In the trackless wastes of Siberia's remote Tunguska river basin, the most devastating cosmic collision ever recorded flattens hundreds of square miles of ancient forest with a blast a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Yet, after more than a hundred years of international scientific investigation, the cause of the cataclysm remains shrouded in mystery.Maverick astrophysicist Jack Adler thinks he's fingered the culprit: the impact with the earth of a submicroscopic black hole, smaller than an atom, more massive than a mountain, older than the stars. What's more, Jack believes that this fantastic object is still down there, deep inside the Earth, burrowing through its mantle in an ever-decaying orbit that will end only when it has devoured the entire planet. Small wonder if the Russians refer to the voracious black hole by their word for vampire - Vurdalak.Rookie secret agent Marianna Bonaventure is tracking three missing Russian scientists suspected of involvement in weapons of mass destruction research. The trail leads her to the luxurious megayacht Rusalka, floating corporate headquarters of billionaire Russian industrialist Arkady Grishin. Determined to prove herself, Marianna creates an elaborate ruse in order to infiltrate the enormous vessel - a dangerous gambit that requires the coerced cooperation of a rather special civilian ...Jonathan Knox is one of the country's most sought-after management consultants; his knack for intuiting hidden relationships among seemingly disparate events serves his Fortune-50 clients well. But when Marianna compels the reluctant Knox to join her undercover on Rusalka, he must grapple with puzzles of a wholly different order of magnitude.Together, these three must battle a globe-spanning conspiracy intent upon capturing Vurdalak and exploiting its awesome power, a power that can transform the world - or end it.