Desperate Gambit

In the early days of America’s growing involvement in the conflict in Vietnam, a secret government project funded and operated by the newly formed Defense Intelligence Agency creates a dashing story of earned affluence, dedication to principles, government treachery, abiding love, and the triumph of ingenuity borne of desperation. Ellen Parker, a research Virologist at UCLA, and Dan Herzog, a Beverly hills plastic surgeon, the darling of Hollywood celebrities, and a Mafia face-fixer, are unwittingly trapped in a Defense Intelligence Agency plan to create a viral defoliant for use in Southeast Asia. In a sinister twist, the DIA have recovered a viable sample of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, and without revealing the entire plan, recruit Ellen to work on the defoliant. They will combine the two into a deadly bioweapon Ellen’s co-worker is ruthlessly assassinated by the DIA to protect its secret when she deduces the truth. She is killed by Saxitoxin, a potent and untraceable paralytic poison. Her death is written off by authorities as having been caused by tainted by seafood. Ellen Parker knows this is impossible. Vicki Mueller was violently allergic to seafood, and never ate it. Dan and Ellen believe they are next, and devise a plan to completely and untraceably disappear. In a way no one would have predicted, they create an escape plan that allows them to vanish convincingly. They will forfeit their properties, and Dan will have his Beechcraft Bonanza crashed in the Mexican Desert with their personal effects and stolen cadaver parts burned beyond reasonable recognition. They will survive a rogue Pacific hurricane on the way to Vancouver in a friend’s sailboat for a harrowing 36 hours, hypothermic, exhausted and hallucinatory, and arrive in Vancouver to drive…