Works in Progress

UPDATE: August 2026

I’ve completed the manuscript and am pursuing agents and publishers. Take a look at the first chapter below.

Spring, 2027

ONE

“There’s our guy, your three o-clock,” Josh said, his hand loosely covering his mouth as if to shield some bit of food from view.

Really? These days, even here, people think nothing of a man with an earpiece talking to someone, or maybe just to himself. But Josh was new, his first time in Damascus, his first time anywhere, and he had some rough edges. They all do starting out. It wasn’t my choice to bring a rookie on this op but someone up the chain decided he could benefit from the experience so here we were.

“Got him. Looks nervous. Hey, so do you. Relax, man. We got this.”

If Josh was wound a bit too tight, so was most everyone here. If a city can be said to have a mood, Damascus’ mood was tense, reminding me of the civil war years – the First Syrian Civil War, as it’s called now – a disjointed, dangerous place tearing itself apart, national death by a thousand factions.   

We were in the Al-Hamidiyah Souq, an enormous market straining against the Old City’s crumbling walls. A typical Levantine souq, you could buy almost anything here, from fresh vegetables to a color TV to a prayer rug to a Kalashnikov to a camel. Shoppers lugged their purchases along the narrow, crowded streets as boys roisted around them on noisy motorbikes filling the overheated air with their acrid exhaust. An old man in a filthy dishdasha pulled a handcart, his freshly butchered, fly-specked goats dripping blood onto the cobbles. Small children darted around him, playing tag while dodging an ever-changing pattern of crimson puddles. 

The Souq’s chaotic press of humanity offered cover, but it also complicated any effort at countersurveillance. With so many faces, running a surveillance detection route was next to useless. We did it anyway. You always ran an SDR before an operational meeting, and I couldn’t set a bad example for the newbie, now, could I?

I didn’t need a shadow. This op was basically a one-man job. Besides, I preferred working alone. One less person to worry about, one less fuck-up to fuck things up. At least Josh had the right look: dark hair, not too tall, not too pale. His accent would sound foreign to a Syrian, but the linguists back in Virginia thought he could pass for working-class Jordanian and that was good enough for them. Thanks, but while they listened to a digital simulacrum of life from the comfort of their sound lab, I was out here on the very real street. Syria, or what’s left of it, was a hotbed of suspicions, plots, and counter plots. I told Langley I didn’t need a reason for anyone to look too closely at us, but no one cared what I thought.

Thanks to my parents’ foreign service postings, I had spent more of my childhood here than back in the U.S., while Josh had a total of nine months in the region, his junior year abroad at the University of Jordan. Even then I bet he spent most of his time with other Western students, drinking, screwing, and speaking English. After a dozen missions here he might grow into a solid operator – most do – but on this day he was just something else for me to worry about.

Spying was all about time, starting with how much it took to learn our craft, not just at The Farm, but out here, where it counted. Unfortunately, in this business, time seldom worked in our favor. There was never enough of it, and when it got tight, that’s when Murphy’s Law kicked in and things could really get sporty.

So, what were we doing in Damascus, anyway? When the civil war heated up again, the politicos in Washington wanted to understand how the new Syrian president was planning to defeat a resurgent ISIS, once again terrorizing the region. Ahmad al-Sharaa, the former al Qaeda leader turned politician, had laid down his weapon and put on a suit and tie. In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction moment, a couple years back he had even been welcomed to the White House, but that didn’t mean we – meaning my government – trusted him. And we certainly didn’t trust him to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. When official DC has a question about the intentions of a foreign power they turn to Langley and Langley turns to people like me – and now Josh. 

Our asset was a skinny, pockmarked, middle-aged Syrian bureaucrat whom I christened Bilal. I had recruited him weeks earlier, carefully tending the relationship with love, cash, and bottles of Johnnie Walker Black. Whatever it took. Love alone is seldom enough to induce someone to commit treason, although agents tend to eat up the shovelfuls I heap. Adding cash to the mix only works if your asset is a snake, likely to bite every hand but the one currently feeding it. But they all have quirks and no two are alike. In the sexually repressed Mideast, some want a girl – or a boy. Others ask for a visa to the U.S. Bilal wanted scotch. That was easy enough.

Eventually, inevitably, he agreed to download documents from the interim government’s interim defense ministry. He was just a low-level clerk, but in the changeover from the Assad regime to the ragtag group of jihadis that had, overnight, been transformed into some sort of government, he had access to their mainframe or cloud or wherever the hell they stored their classified documents. For my purposes he was golden.

I had given Bilal a special thumb drive to download the take. It looked innocent enough, shaped like a surfboard keychain, one end coming off to reveal a USB connector. Thumb drives in cute coverings were on sale everywhere, but this one was both high-capacity and encrypted. I suggested he tape it into a folded newspaper and leave it beside me on the bar of a busy café, but for whatever reason he didn’t want to do this handover indoors, preferring a brush pass in the crowded Souq. I didn’t like it, but he insisted. I didn’t like that either, but Langley was pushing for results and sometimes you have to trust your asset’s judgement, even if you don’t trust him. Paranoia is a fact of life for anyone betraying his government and, in Syria, fractured by a renewed civil war, it was table stakes. It was also a necessity of my profession.

“Twenty meters,” Josh called out. Christ! I could see Bilal’s approach for myself. The kid was jumpy, and jumpy people made me, well, jumpy. Maybe I should have slipped him an Ativan this morning. I had considered it.

“Copy. Hold tight. I’ll make this quick.” I had just turned to intercept Bilal’s route when I spotted two beefy men stuffed into dark suits, white dress shirts open at the collar, and wraparound shades – with Middle Eastern secret policemen, why was it always wraparounds? “Shit. Josh, GIS ten paces behind Bilal. Go. Rally point. I’ll deal with this.”

“I’m cool, Jim, no problem.”

“No, Josh. Just fucking go.”

But he didn’t go. He probably thought he was doing the right thing, backing me up, or maybe he didn’t want to miss the action. I don’t know why he stayed, but he did.

“Josh, behind you!”

Two more guys in wraparounds entered the narrow street from his blind side. It was a trap. Was Bilal a part of it? As Josh turned, the second pair lunged, body-slamming him against the stone wall. On cue, the pair following Bilal ran up to take him. Bilal made a run for it, dropping the incriminating thumb drive into a fruit vendor’s cart. Across the street, Josh struggled, landing a solid punch against one guy’s jaw and an elbow in the other’s solar plexus. Krav Maga. Good. Now run, kid. Damn it, just run!

With a commotion around Josh at one end of the street and another around Bilal at the other, no one had yet made me. Josh needed help but, mission first – it was always mission first – I went to the fruit cart and picked up the thumb drive. While my was back turned, no more than ten seconds, one of the GIS thugs, the one whose mouth was bleeding, had pressed a Makarov 9mm against the side of Josh’s head. I read helplessness and terror on the kid’s face, but he didn’t call out. In fact, he looked away. I will always believe he did that to avoid drawing attention to me. That was discipline, training overpowering fear. It was also something else, something The Farm couldn’t teach.

Josh’s eyes widened. He must have felt the click of Makarov’s safety being released, the muzzle still pressed to his skull. The secret policeman smiled in a way I understood all too well. I was only ten meters away. If I hadn’t gone for the thumb drive, I might have gotten there in time, but I did what I did and here we were. I pulled the compact Sig Sauer P365 from the pancake holstering it at my waist, but there were people between me and Josh, no clear shot. I walked toward him, nodding slowly, reassurance I was coming.

I was too late. Josh’s head exploded as the crack of a gunshot filled the narrow street. He stumbled back, then slumped unnaturally against the bloody wall, half-sitting, half-lying like a passed-out wino, except that his startled eyes were wide open. His legs jerked, then fell quiet.

That shot triggered a stampede, people fleeing in every direction, giving me a clear line of sight. The Sig’s short barrel was great for concealment, but its accuracy dipped at any kind of distance. Josh was dead and I had the thumb drive, so I should have just turned and walked away. But I couldn’t let the Syrian get away with the cold-blooded murder of a case officer, and sure as hell not one I was responsible for. I closed to no more than five meters, no-miss distance. That morning I was loading hollow points, their stopping power compensating for the P365’s accuracy; any kind of hit would make a mess.

As I raised the Sig, Josh’s killer turned. Behind the shades, I imagined he saw only the business end of the 9mm. I knew how that felt. I fired twice, striking him in the shoulder and then center mass after I twitched an adjustment. He went down, a clean kill. His partner reached for a weapon. Too slow. I slewed right and put two more rounds into him, shredding his gut. Another kill, but he would suffer for a time before breathing his last. Fine with me.

The guys chasing Bilal broke off, turning toward the sound of gunfire. Our escape route was planned; I just needed to get there. Even in the best of circumstances, a crowded souq is a difficult place to run, worse in the chaos unleashed by a firefight. At least my pursuers were forced to follow single file.

I had set our meet near the edge of the Souq, constrained by the Old City’s walls, hoping for a quick exit after the brush pass that never happened. Auto traffic was nearly impossible here, but if I could make it through the Bab al-Faraj gate to Al Malik Faisal Street, a major artery parallelling the walls beside the Barada River, I had a chance.

Dodging panicked street vendors and overloaded shoppers weighing whether to drop their purchases and run, I upset a cartload of bright purple eggplant. One exploded, hit by gunfire. I ducked and bobbed and weaved like a running back evading a mass of confused defenders. More rounds ricocheted off the stone walls. One passed close by with a distinctive whoosh. After decades of bloody repression and years of open conflict, Damascenes were accustomed to violent government action. At the sound of gunfire, bystanders instinctively hugged the ground or hid behind something solid. I didn’t have time to consider these innocents; I just ran for my life.

The Bab al-Faraj gate, a narrow passage through thick stone walls, was designed for donkey carts in an earlier millennium. That didn’t stop Syrians from trying to drive their cars through it. A tightly packed line of traffic waiting for a light to change gave me an opportunity. One random soul, wrong time, wrong place, sat alone in a Fiat 500 with his elbow propped in the open window, blissfully unaware of the trouble headed his way. I holstered my Sig and pulled open his door, but when I tried to drag him into the street by his collar, his seatbelt snagged, turning him nearly upside down. When I reached in to unsnap it, the bastard resisted, so I punched him once, hard. Then I freed him, pulled him out, threw him to the pavement, and climbed in.

I put the car in gear, glancing briefly in the rearview mirror. The GIS pair were struggling through the crowd but closing. No choice, with the carjacked driver fumbling with his phone, probably calling for help, I rammed the cars front and back of me to gain some maneuvering room, cranked the wheel left, and forced the tiny subcompact into the narrow space between the traffic lane and the Gate’s rough stone wall. It was tight, and there was a risk of getting stuck in the constricted passage, so I did the only thing I could – I floored it. The driver’s side scraped stone, sheet metal screeching at the insult. Sparks flew. So did bullets. One shattered the Fiat’s rear window, showering me with glass. Exiting the tunnel-like Gate, I shot into traffic without a glance – so common a maneuver that it drew only perfunctory honks – and made for the highway out of town. If I were caught, carjacking, assault, GTA, and reckless driving would be the least of my sins.

I drove like hell to the LZ, a clearing just outside the city, where I met a stealthy Air Branch chopper for short flight to Turkey. Strapped into a jump seat, my adrenaline ebbing, I had to ask myself: whatever we got on this op – and, really, who gave a fuck about Syria? – we’d lost a man. Was it worth it? But that wasn’t for me to decide.

The moment we touched down at the sprawling Incirlik airbase a young woman from The Company’s local station ran up. She was about Josh’s age, a newbie case officer passing messages from the safety of an American base in a friendly country. That’s what he should have been doing instead of getting himself killed, “A message from home, about your mother,” she said, relieving me of the thumb drive. She pointed along the flightline to an Air Force long hauler making final preparations. “Headed back to Andrews!” She yelled.

“Tell them to hold!” I called back over the din.

I raced over and hitched a ride. It was a long flight, and second-guessing was inevitable after an op went sideways. I hadn’t wanted to bring Josh along, I didn’t need him, but he was there, my responsibility. I couldn’t shake that. As always, I’d put mission first, and now a twenty-three-year-old was dead. 

Who the hell had I become?  

***********************

Overview

A revitalized ISIS is once again waging war on everybody across the Middle East while staging terror attacks in Europe. CIA believes the group’s elusive Minister of War, Codenamed Cyclops, is planning strikes on US diplomats, but they’ve been unable to locate him. Until, perhaps, now.

Jim Marino is a NOC, a Non-Official-Cover case officer. Always a loner, as his ex accuses him, Work alone, live alone, die alone? But maybe that’s because he has never known who he really is. On her deathbed, Jim’s mother reveals that she rescued him as an infant when his Lebanese parents were killed by Hezbollah. From CIA, Jim learns he has a brother, Salim, a member of ISIS who is close to the Cyclops.

KRISIS (Kill the Ratfucks at ISIS) is a kill team led by Doc Robinson, a ruthless, eccentric assassin. Doc sends Jim to live deep cover in Lebanon, then leads Salim to “find” his long-lost baby brother. Salim brings Jim to Raqqa, the ISIS capital, where Jim grows close to the family he never knew existed. Despite this growing attachment, including an unlikely love, Jim must locate and rain hell down on the Cyclops before ISIS can launch a devastating attack on the US.