Lethal Circuit by Lars Guignard

WARNING: "You will not be able to let it go until you read to the very last page."
From Bestselling Amazon Author, Lars Guignard, comes the #1 turbo-charged, Techno-Spy Thriller, Lethal Circuit.


A Chinese satellite is on a crash course with Earth. 

It contains enough plutonium to irradiate a large city. 

And that's the good news...


Michael Chase is a twenty-six year old backpacker, a recent college grad, an amateur. He flew to Hong Kong to find his missing father. Four hours later, he's running for his life. The Chinese Secret Police want him dead. The Conspiracy wants him dead. And the one person who he thinks is on his side, may want him dead too. If Michael is going to live, he'll need to find a hidden piece of Nazi technology lost since World War II. And he'll have to do it before anyone else. Because if he doesn't, a little plutonium is going to be the least of his problems.

Can Michael Chase team up with a beautiful but deadly MI6 agent to find a lethal piece of Nazi technology that will save the world?



If you can't get enough of the action and suspense of Lee Child, the intrigue of Robert Ludlum, and the adventure of Clive Cussler and James Rollins, you are going to LOVE Lethal Circuit!

Excerpt:

HONG KONG

CHUNGKING MANSIONS. Even the name sounded decrepit. Twenty-seven stories of decaying concrete apartment block that made the worst housing project in America look like the Hilton. The truth was, Chungking Mansions wasn’t so much a residence as a third world city stuffed into a condemned building occupying some of the most valuable real estate on the planet. Why it still stood was a bureaucratic mystery, but the prevailing theory was that it had taken the place of the old Kowloon Walled City which had been razed years previously.

 

The old Walled City had been a historical anomaly: an unclaimed property lying in the no man’sland between Chinese and British jurisdiction that had grown into a tangled web of vice and commerce the likes of which the world had never seen. There was no law. There was no order. There was only humanity run amok in a group of structures that had slowly but steadily grown into one another until they became one and the same: six and a half acres of madness, fourteen stories high. The old Walled City had finally met the wrecking ball, but its displaced residents had needed some place to go and that place was Chungking. In a word, Chungking was hell, Hong Kong style. It was also home to some of the finest South Indian curry on the Pacific Rim. It was this curry and theice cold beer that accompanied it that added up to the long trough style urinal Michael Chase now stood before.

 

Michael stifled a cough as he undid the fly of his cargo shorts. He’d stepped off the plane from Seattle less than four hours earlier and already he thought he might have picked up a case of tuberculosis. No worries, he thought, he was twenty-six and in the best shape of his life. A run of antibiotics and he’d be fine. What mattered now wasn’t what disease he might have contracted, or how quickly the beer had run through him, or even how sharply the climbing pack he wore over one shoulder dug into the small of his back. What mattered was that he focus his attention on the task at hand.

 

Because Michael hadn’t flown eight thousand miles to take a leak. He had much more serious business to attend to and right now every ounce of that business revolved around his urinal mate, the man slouched over the trough two feet to his left. One hand poised on the grimy cracked subway tile, the other in his pants, the older man went by the name of Shanghai Larry, and as he stood there, his tired Eurasian features twisted into an alcoholic stupor, Michael reflected that the moniker could hardly be more appropriate. Salt-and-pepper hair curling just above the tops of his ears and a perfect mole on his chin, if anybody had one foot on Bond Street and the other on the Bund, Larry was the man. The restroom door opened, flooding the shadows with light, and Michael steeled his nerve. It was now or never. Zipping back up, he turned to Larry and uttered the words he’d traveled so far to say.

“I know what you did,” he said. “I know that you killed my father."

• • •

OUTSIDE THE RESTROOM door, the woman listened intently.

She was tired, but she suspected that if there was any truth to what she had overheard, her evening had just begun. She stepped away from the door as a third man entered the restroom.

Unlike the men inside, this man moved deliberately. As if he had something important to do.

 

Something more than relieve himself. The woman knew she needed to get closer. She slipped in the swinging door before it shut. Now, as she stood in the outer vestibule, a five-foot partition wall providing just enough cover to hide her from where the men were lined up at the trough, she praised her instincts. Even if she was wrong about the third man, there was definitely something up with Michael. Something a whole lot bigger than he had previously let on. She listened intently to Larry’s reply.

“That’s a hell of an accusation, Sport.”

 

“It’s not an accusation. It’s a fact. You were the last to see him alive. You two had some kind of issue. You owed him money.”

 

“Doesn’t mean I killed him.”

 

“Get real, Larry.”

 

“Listen, Sport, I know this is a difficult time for you.”

“Cut the Sport shit. If you didn’t do it, who did?”

 

Larry ran a hand through his thick head of hair. “Pay attention, I’m serious here. It’s looked bad for me from the beginning. But I’m not your man. I never was. And I can prove it.”

 

“How?”

“Your dad —”

“Yeah, Larry?”

“He sent me this.”

 

Michael forced himself to breathe as Larry zipped up and reached drunkenly into his jacket pocket. He had noticed their new urinal mate, a powerfully built Chinese man with a pock-marked

face and zebra striped hair, but paid him little heed. His concern now was Larry — Larry who had pulled a cell phone from his pocket and was lazily tapping its dirty touch screen. When a video finally began to play on the phone’s display, the first thing Michael noticed was the lack of sound.
 

Apparently the volume was off. The next thing he noticed was that the man on the screen was his father. He was bearded and looked very tired, black circles under his eyes, but it was his dad, anybody could see that. Then, before he could get a better look, all hell broke loose.

 

 

Michael had caught a glimpse of the lean, tan woman entering the restroom behind him. He was well aware that her name was Kate, but that didn’t concern him at present. What concerned him was how quickly the man with the zebra striped hair had managed to interject his stout frame between Larry and himself. In that moment Larry seemed to recognize that something was very wrong because he pulled the cell phone back. Then, Zebra bent to his side and Michael saw what looked like a tattooed snake wrestling a tiger inked to the base of his muscular neck. A quarter second later Zebra had produced a black alloy butterfly knife from the depths of his long leather jacket. Michael stepped back. Zebra unfolded the knife in a smooth flick of the wrist, pressing the two halves of its handle together to form a lethal weapon.

What happened next was fragmented. Michael saw the glint of the blade under the flicker of the fluorescent light. He heard Larry let out a blood curdling moan. Then he saw the phone slide across the grimy tile, followed by Larry’s collapse to the floor. Blood covered Larry’s white Frenchcut shirt and more was flowing out. Even in the poor light Michael could see that he had been stabbed in the heart, and though he immediately brought his hand to Larry’s chest to stem the

bleeding, his attention was torn. Zebra, a mere ten feet away, had stooped down to pick up the cell phone. He wrapped his fingers around it, idly scooping it up like he had all the time in the world.

And that’s when the woman smashed him on the head.

 

Zebra went down in a slow motion thud. Like he’d been switched off. And then for a second, maybe more, all was quiet. Michael couldn’t be sure what the woman had used to hit him, but it was irrelevant. The net effect was that Zebra was now splayed out unconscious on the filthy bathroom floor beside Larry, blood trickling down from behind his left ear. Michael was uncertain of the number of men who

number of men who next entered the restroom. All he knew was that they wore turbans and that upon seein the carnage they ran out as quickly as they had come in. The men gone, Michael knelt on the floor. He lifted a blood soaked hand from Larry’s heart and placed two fingers on his neck to check his pulse. He was silent for a long moment before looking up at the woman who stared down at him from the corner of the room.

 “He’s dead,” Michael said flatly.

The woman nodded, eyeing Zebra warily as she stooped down to pick up the bloody cell phone. She had barely grasped it in her hand before the sound of her breath was drowned out by a shrill fire alarm. It was followed by what sounded like movement on the floors below and then the pounding echo of jackboots in the stairwell. She cast her gaze at Zebra’s tiger-snake tattoo before redirecting it to the broken bathroom window.

 
“Follow me,” she said. “Follow me or die.”