Rick Mofina - Six Seconds

Praise for Six Seconds by

Six Seconds should be Rick Mofinas breakout thriller. It moves like a tornado.
James Patterson, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Six Seconds is a great read. Echoing Ludlum and Forsythe, author Mofina has penned a big, solid international thriller that grabs your gutand your heartin the opening scenes and never lets go.

Jeffery Deaver, New York Times bestselling author

A perfect thriller, in every way. Very powerful and very, very clever: this novel hits the ground running and stays with you long past the finish line. Nick Stone, internationally acclaimed author

Classic virtues but tomorrows subjects everything we need from a great thriller. Lee Child, New York Times bestselling author

Rick Mofinas Six Seconds is filled with thrills and chills if you love edge-of-the-seat suspense, believable characters and an absorbing and twisting tale, dont miss it! Heather Graham, New York Times bestselling author

Mofina is one hell of a storyteller! A great crime writer! Hkan Nesser, internationally acclaimed author

Praise for other books by

Blood of Others is tense, realistic
and scary in all the right places.
James Patterson, New York Times bestselling author

No Way Back is my kind of novela tough, taut thriller. Michael Connelly, New York Times bestselling author

[ No Way Back is] a tightly wound spring of suspense and terror.
David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author

Rick Mofina is writing a fine series of thrillers. [Be Mine is] swiftly paced, entertaining, with authentic details of police procedure.
Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author

The Dying Hour starts scary and ends scary. Youll be craving Mofinas next novel.
Sandra Brown, New York Times bestselling author

[ Every Fear] pushes crackling suspense to the breaking point and beyonda must read!
Kay Hooper, New York Times bestselling author

[ A Perfect Grave is] a lightning-paced thriller with lean, tense writing.Mofina really knows how to make the story fly. Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author

This book is for
Jeff Aghassi, Ann LaFarge, Mildred Marmur and
John Rosenberg and Jeannine Rosenberg. Because no one gets through life without the help of others.

It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to
climb back again, to retrace ones steps to the upper airtheres the rub, the task. Virgil
Aeneid

Prologue

The woman in the video is wearing a white shoulderlength hijab, embroidered with delicate beadwork. Her immaculate silk scarf frames her face, accentuating her natural beauty. She gives a tiny nod to the camera.

A soft cue is heard, then she begins.
I am Samara. I am not a jihadist. I am a widowmother baptized with the blood of my husband and my child when your governments murdered them.
Her strong, intelligent voice underscores her resolve in accented English, suggesting a mix of the Middle East and East London. Her eyes burn into the camera as it pulls back slowly. She speaks directly to the audience who will soon meet her on every television set in the world.
She lets a moment pass in silence. Her hands are clasped before her on a plain wooden table. Her rings glint from her thumb and wedding finger. The camera eases back, revealing a framed family photograph of a man, a boy and the woman herself. They are smiling. Joy swims in the womans eyes. For it is a portrait of her from another time. Another life. It stands next to her as headstone to her happiness and witness to her destiny. 10 Rick Mofina

To exchange pain.
For the intelligence analysts who will study her message, there is no prepared statement. No grenade launcher on display before her. No AK-47 flanking her.
No chanting from the glorious text.
There are no black-and-gold flags on the walls behind her. No flags of any group. No carpet or fabric. The background is simple with angled mirrors.
Nothing betrays the womans location, where she is recording her video or who is helping her. She could be in a safe house in the West Bank. Or in Athens. Maybe in Manila, Paris or London. Perhaps Madrid, or Casablanca.
Or in a suburb of the United States.
Your soldiers invaded my home, tortured my hus band and child. They forced them to watch as one by one they defiled me. Then they killed my husband and my son before my eyes. They fled when your bombers delivered death to my city. I carried my dead child through the ruins and to the bank of the river of Eden where I buried him, my husband and my life. But I have been resurrected to seek justice for these crimes.
And it is for these crimes that I deliver my widowmothers wrath. For these crimes you will taste death.
Dying for me does not mean death. Dying for me is a promise kept. For I will have avenged the destruction of my world by bringing death to yours. Death is my reward as I join my husband and my child in paradise. For them, I am the eternal martyr. For them, I am ven geance.

Book One:

Where is My Son?

Blue Rose Creek, California

Maggie Conlin left her house believing a lie.

She believed life was normal again. She believed that the trouble preying on her family had passed, that Logan, her nine-year-old son, had come to terms with the toll Iraq had taken on them.

But the truth niggled at Maggie as she drove to work. Their scarsthe invisible oneshad not healed. This morning, when shed stood with Logan waiting

for the school bus, he was uneasy.
You love Dad, right, Mom?
Absolutely. With all my heart.
Logan looked at the ground and kicked a pebble. What is it? she asked.
I worry that something bad is going to happen. Like

you might get a divorce.

Maggie clasped his shoulders. No ones getting divorced. Its okay to be confused. It hasnt been easy these past few months since Daddy got home. But the worst is over now, right?

Logan nodded.

Daddy and I will always be right here, together in this house. Always. Okay?
Okay.
Remember, Im picking you up after school today for your swim class. So dont get on the bus.
Okay. Love you, Mom.
Logan hugged her so hard it hurt. Then he ran to his bus, waved and smiled from the window before he vanished.
Maggie reflected on his worries as she drove through Blue Rose Creek, a city of a hundred thousand near Riverside County, on her way to the Liberty Valley Promenade Mall. She parked her Ford Focus and clocked in at Stobel and Chadwick, where she was a senior associate bookseller.
Her morning went fast as she called customers telling them orders had arrived, helped others find titles, sug gested gift books and restocked bestsellers. As busy as she was, Maggie could not escape the truth. Her family had been fractured by events no one could control.
Her husband, Jake, was a trucker. In recent years, his rig had kept breaking down, and the bills piled up. It was bad. To help, he took a contract job driving in Iraq. High-paying, but dangerous. Maggie didnt want him to go. But they needed the money.
When he came home a few months ago, he was a changed man. He fell into long, dark moods, grew mis trustful, paranoid and had unexplained outbursts. Some thing had happened to him in Iraq but he refused to talk about it, refused to get help.
Was it all behind them?
Their debts were cleared, theyd put money in the bank. Jake had good long-haul driving jobs and seemed to have settled down, leaving Maggie to believe that maybe, just maybe, the worst was over.
Call for you, Maggie, came the voice over the P.A. system. She took it at the kiosk near the art history books.
Maggie Conlin. May I help you?
Its me.
Jake? Where are you?
Baltimore. Are you working all day today?
Yes. When do you expect to get home?
Ill be back in California by the weekend. Hows Logan?