Near Miss: A spy, a terrorist, and a nuclear attack

A federal investigator sifts through the rubble after a terrorist attack destroys Washington with a nuclear weapon. Jackson Guild—that's Guild as in wild—gets the call to action, but he's drawn between two dangerous poles of power, one from the military and one from the intelligence community. Both threaten to have him quartered if he fails.

The Pentagon’s CSI-like forensics team, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, wants Guild to blame the attack on Islamo-terrorism. But Langley’s spooks shout foul. They find Vladimir Putin’s fingerprints all over the sneak attack, and they want Guild to deliver the news. Though a burned out case, Guild happens upon a curious new bit of evidence.

He’s learned that the truth about the strike lies along a DNA strand of an imprisoned Wall Street War Lord. A simple calculation made from his genetic code holds the cipher key, which unlocks the actual orders to destroy Washington. Guild’s instantly in the chase for the genome, but he’s drinking again and making mistakes, which is too bad, because, he’s about to be kidnapped, shot in the face, and held hostage to a gang of Russian thugs. And they hold the strand of DNA.