Ribbons of Death

The Peacetaker myth is just a dusty old legend, so obscure that it might be mentioned once or twice at an equally obscure academic convention of historians and college professors…until a symbolic march in Cairo turns into a deadly riot that leaves hundreds of women and children dead and sends thousands more to hospitals. One survivor of the deadly carnage is an ex-special forces soldier, Timothy Carter.

His military training along with his engineering degree made him an ideal candidate for the FBI undercover-contract work that saw him attending a water-shortages conference in Cairo. While his elegant business card supports his identity as an executive for an environmental firm out of Toledo, Ohio, his hidden mandate is to track a terrorist financier who has been hiding in plain sight—seemingly untouchable by any law agency of any country.

Three months after the deadly riot, scarred and barely-healed Carter, is heading for a sleepy hamlet in upstate Montana, a blood-stained book in hand. His operative took it from the hospital bed stand of a traffic fatality in Cairo. He means to ask the book’s author, a reclusive academic Dr. Stella Hunter, about one minor reference to an ancient Peacetaker myth…the one featured in the passage smeared with the book owner’s blood.