The Sleeper A Novel

Kurt Kurtovic wanted nothing more than to be left in peace, to make a life with his wife and child in Westfield, Kansas. Then September 11 happened and Kurt knew they'd never be safe again unless he did what only he could do, take terror to the terrorists. He knew their world, knew how they worked, knew their weak points. He knew, because he'd been one of them.But as Kurt wages his bloody campaign, hunting down his former Al-Qaeda comrades in Britain, Spain, and Africa, he becomes the hunted. And so do his wife and child back home. The most dangerous agents of terror, he discovers, are in the United States: those who don't want the wars to end; those who believe "we have waited thousands of years for Judgment Day, never knowing when it would come. But now we can put it on the calendar. We can fix a date." As a man-made apocalypse approaches, Kurt realizes that some of America's most ruthless enemies walk its corridors of power every day.In the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carre, this hard-driving narrative of vengeance and redemption by one of America's most prescient writers on espionage and terror is a riveting thriller about the horrors of the recent past -- and the dangers of the near future.

Christopher Dickey, Newsweek's award-winning Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor, reports regularly from Baghdad, Cairo, and Jerusalem, and writes the weekly "Shadowland" column -- an inside look at the world of spies and soldiers, guerrillas and suicide bombers -- for Newsweek Online. He is the author of Summer of Deliverance, Expats, With the Contras, and the novel Innocent Blood. He lives in Paris.