The Cairo Conspiracy

Book excerpt: Lying in a pool of blood following a skiing accident at Vail, Secretary of State George Milam repeatedly mumbles a seemingly incoherent phrase. Using a memo recorder, a member of Milam’s skiing party documents his curious vocalizations. The secretary of state’s nonsensical ramblings will soon shake the world. Immediately upon analyzing the recording, Dr. Judith Miller3⁄4a talented linguist with the National Security Agency3⁄4realizes that Secretary Milam is speaking in the flawless Arabic of a native Egyptian speaker. Contrary to Milam’s dossier, the secretary of state is clearly not who he claims to be. Neither, she soon discovers, is the undersecretary of energy, Peter Laval. Using computerized voice spectrograms, Dr. Miller identifies fragmentary traces of guttural Arabic consonants in Laval’s otherwise perfect American English. She determines that Laval’s early roots, like Milam’s, are in Cairo. And if Cairo-based conspirators had surreptitiously transplanted both Milam and Laval into the U.S. decades earlier, what other covert Egyptian nationals now held sensitive U.S. government positions? And why had Laval suddenly begun to place so many calls to nuclear power plants? This is the challenge confronting Dr. Noel Parke, the director of the New York region of the Department of Homeland Protection. With the help of the gifted Dr. Miller, Parke must race against time to uncover and dismantle the intricate network of sleeper cells, and uncover the deadly goals of The Cairo Conspiracy.