Barbican: A Sterling McQueen Spy Story

Sterling McQueen is a different kind of spy. He lives off the grid and below the radar. No computer. No cell phone. No fancy gadgets. Nothing that would allow his enemies to track him. He lives by his wits and the tradecraft he learned from the greatest of a lost generation of spies. Instead of cyber hacks and geosynchronous satellite tracking, McQueen's world is one of dead drops, concealment devices, and black bag jobs. In a world of Big Brother watching our every move Sterling McQueen is invisible.

He works for a super-secret intelligence agency, the Strategic Support Branch. The SSB relies primarily on the nearly lost art of human intelligence. They cultivate assets abroad to burrow deep down inside the organizations that pose the biggest threat to the United States of America. What was old is now new again, and Sterling McQueen's special set of skills are once again in high demand. Super computers and stealth drones are no longer enough to keep the world safe. The world now needs Sterling McQueen.

Let's face it, most books in the spy genre these days rely far too much on gadgetry and over-the-top stunts that only happen in the movies. Isn't it time someone returned to the vintage spy novel? Barbican is a political thriller written in the mold of the old spy classics. Our hero, Sterling McQueen, shuns modern technology in favor of the more reliable standbys of human intelligence and his own keen power of deduction. This is a mystery/thriller filled with intrigue, layered with nuance, and peppered with more twists and turns than an Alpine highway.

Hostages are being snatched all across Europe. They come from different countries and different backgrounds, but they all have two traits in common. They're Jewish and they're rich. German intelligence is close to solving the mystery when an asset--a professor of Middle Eastern studies--is kidnapped in Brussels. Sterling McQueen is dispatched by the Strategic Support Branch (SSB) in the United States to assist in the case. He discovers a tangled web of deception and secrecy that has world intelligence agencies chasing their own tails.

The adventure leads McQueen to Brussels, Munich, Zurich, Vienna, and a remote Austrian fortress or barbican. McQueen peels back the many layers of this case to discover he's dealing with an unconventional kind of terrorist group. Their plan could totally realign the power structure of the world. They communicate in a unique code that McQueen has to solve if he's going to stop them from carrying out their ultimate mission.