Friday, April 10, 2020

Four Horsemen Novel Excerpt

With everything being a dumpster fire right now, I thought it was the perfect time to share an excerpt from 1-800-Henchmen: Four Horsemen, since, you know, the world's ending. Enjoy!



“Meet the Four Horsemen: War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death.”
“Do they have real names?” LeRoy frowned.
“I’d imagine they do, but we could not find anything anywhere on the planet that reveals them.”
“What do we know?” Ray asked, studying the pictures.
The first one was a picture of War, -the woman Ray had found on the footage that had started their search. She was short and stocky with chin-length black and red hair. She had a tattoo on her neck that curled from just under her jaw down into her shirt. The picture looked like it was a mug shot from a prison in a third-world country and War was not happy to be there.
The second, Pestilence, was a man who greatly resembled War except he had white streaks in his long black hair and multiple facial piercings. The picture was from a security camera taken in a train station somewhere and showed Pestilence glancing covertly over his shoulder, a laptop case clutched tight to his chest.
The third picture showed a handsome blond man in a black-on-black-on-black power suit. Famine had been photographed stepping out of a black Maybach sedan in front of what looked like a country club somewhere tropical.
The fourth was of a beautiful blond woman with her hair pulled back severely from her face. Death was in a sharp charcoal suit, heels, and had large jade jewelry on that should have ruined the professional outfit but somehow enhanced it. She was standing in front of a steel-and-glass office building with a phone pressed to her ear and a briefcase in her other hand.
“Very little, actually.” Gibson sat down and gave his team a rueful smile. “This picture was from when War was captured in Russia after leading an attack on a government building in Moscow. She is a combat expert and a fairly popular mercenary. Very few people have been able to best her, and the only reason she was captured in Moscow was because she was drugged by a person on her own team. Even then, it took three Russian soldiers to take her in.”
Nikolai bristled at the thought that a small woman could get the better of his countrymen. “I will show her.”
Gibson chuckled. “Pestilence is War’s brother. As far as we can tell, they were born in Eastern Europe somewhere but spent a significant amount of their lives in the US. He is a ghost in the system and one of the best computer hackers I have ever seen or heard of. He is probably the reason the Four Horsemen don’t seem to exist. It’s tough to completely erase somebody from every computer system in the world, but a good enough hacker could do it, given enough time.”
“He better than you, cap?” Alfie asked with an impish grin.
“Yep.” Gibson’s eyes glittered dangerously. “But that’s not going to stop me from trying to bring him down.”
“Those are some crazy eyes, you got there.” Alfie leaned back with an exaggerated leery expression on his face.
Gibson shook his head and turned back to the pictures. “Famine is the idea man. He is the one who makes the plans and oversees execution. He creates relationships with powerful people in banks to get information about computer systems, layout, et cetera and then uses that information to make his plans infallible.”
LeRoy scoffed. “No plan is infallible.”
La Grenouille Bouché would know,” Ray teased.
“Last, but not least, is Death.” Gibson cut them off before LeRoy could retort. “She is the one who gets the impossible information. No one seems to know how she does it. Even the people she has worked over can’t explain it. They just know they gave her the information but they can’t remember what kind of coercion she used. She works closely with Famine on the planning process.”
“What’s the plan?” Nikolai asked.
“What the plan normally is: direct confrontation, divert catastrophe, capture the bad guys.”
“Make the AOJ look good,” Ray muttered.
“We leave for London on Thursday morning. Let’s get prepped.”


Find the rest in 1-800-Henchmen: The Complete Series on Amazon.

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