OPERATOR DOWN

OVERVIEW

Brad Taylor delivers a heart-pounding thriller where Pike Logan’s search for a Mossad agent and ally puts him on a collision course with a ruthless military coup in Africa—and tests his loyalties to the Taskforce.

It was to be a simple mission. Nothing more than assessing whether a merchant in the fabled Israeli Diamond Exchange was involved in a scheme that could potentially embarrass the state of Israel. But nothing is ever simple in the world of intelligence, as Aaron Bergman—a former leader of an elite direct action team under the Mossad—should have known. Executing the operation as a contractor, a cutout that gave the State of Israel plausible deniability, he disappears without a trace.

Pike Logan and his team know none of this, but he’s tracking an American arms dealer in Tel Aviv who may—or may not—be attempting to sell sensitive nuclear weapons components to the highest bidder. When Pike’s team breaks up an attempt at killing Shoshana, Aaron’s partner, they stumble upon much more than they expected—a concerted conspiracy to topple a democratic African country.

Beginning to untangle a web that extends through both the American and Israeli intelligence community, Pike is forced to choose between his Israeli friends and his Taskforce mission, even as the execution of the coup begins to form. At the heart of it is Aaron, and his disappearance is the one mistake the plotters made. Because Shoshana is the greatest killing machine the Mossad has ever produced, and she will stop at nothing to help Aaron, even if it means killing Pike Logan.

EXCERPT

Chapter 1

Being a spy is a lot like being a bank robber. In espionage—as in crime—it’s always the little things that get you. You can plan for an entire operation, allowing for one contingency after another, foreseeing when and where things might go wrong, but you inevitably miss the little things. A drop of sweat on a doorknob, drywall shavings left behind after the installation of a bug, a nick in the brass plate of a lock from a tension wrench. Small things with huge impacts.

In this case, the little thing happened before Aaron Bergmann had even left Israel, when a travel voucher routed through Mossad headquarters included a man who had been specifically excluded from the mission read-on. For a specific reason. And that little thing would prove devastating for Aaron and his neophyte apprentice.

FEATURED MEDIA

Scottsdale, AZ, The Poisoned Pen Bookstore with Barbara Peters

PRAISE

“As usual in the Pike Logan series, the spycraft and related technology are fascinating, the dialogue crackles, and all the players are operating in an international sea of moral ambiguity. Recommend Pike Logan to readers who like their spies tough, smart, and bordering on superhuman.”

—Booklist

“Since Taylor throttled back to one book a year (after previously maintaining a two-book-per-year publishing schedule), he’s taken his writing to another level… Operator Down is perhaps Taylor’s finest work yet.”

—The Real Book Spy

“Brad Taylor’s Pike Logan thrillers just keep getting better and Operator Down is his most ambitious and fully realized yet… Taylor continues to stand with Brad Thor and James Rollins at the top of the action-thriller genre. But Operator Down features the polished echoes of Daniel Silva and even John le Carré, a thriller that’s at once both cerebral and muscular, a rare combination that Taylor pulls off with skill and aplomb.”

—Providence Journal

“With his experience as an officer in the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Taylor (Ring of Fire, 2016, etc.) brings firsthand military knowledge to the Nephilim “Pike” Logan series… A believable account of elite operators working outside traditional government parameters to track international villains.”

—Kirkus

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