An Accidental American: A Novel (Mortalis)

Forced out of a self-imposed exile, one woman faces a lifetime's worth of secrets and betrayal--all in the name of staying alive. Nicole Blake had planned to leave her criminal life in the past. She had done her time in a dank prison in Marseille and relinquished the world of forgery and counterfeiting for an unassuming career as a freelance consultant. Now her world is a small farm in the French Pyrenees, with daily fresh eggs and the companionship of her devoted dog.But when U.S. intelligence operative John Valsamis shows up at her door, Nicole is reminded that she'll always be an ex-con. Valsamis is after Nicole's former lover, Rahim Ali, and soon Nicole finds herself back in Lisbon, tracking down Rahim in all their old haunts. Except now Rahim isn't just a document forger--he's a suspected terrorist. Unwittingly drawn into an international web of fundamentalism, crime, and corruption, Nicole discovers that its threads stretch from the cobbled streets of Lisbon to the once-beautiful city of her birth, Beirut, and to the top levels of the government that sent Valsamis to find her. And as with any good web, the harder Nicole fights to free herself, the tighter it closes around her. "Thought-provoking . . . The gritty atmosphere is perfectly drawn, and complex layers of lies and betrayal keep the reader happily guessing up to the end."--Publishers Weekly"Chilling and utterly believable, An Accidental American hurls the reader into the dark and forbidding world of espionage. Not to be missed."--Gayle Lynds, author of The Last Spymaster______________________________________________________________THE MORTALIS DOSSIER- ALEX CARR'S NOTE ON THE BOMBING OF THE AMERICAN EMBASSY IN BEIRUTOn April 18, 1983, at one o'clock in the afternoon, a van carrying twothousand pounds of explosives blew up outside the American embassyin Beirut, killing sixty-three people. Among the victims wereseventeen Americans, eight of whom represented the Central IntelligenceAgency's entire Middle East contingent. In the years precedingthe bombing, an increasing number of attacks on Western andIsraeli interests had been carried out by Palestinian and Muslim extremists,but the Beirut bombing was widely seen as a watershedevent for American policies in the region. With the exception of theseizure of the American embassy in Tehran four years earlier, an actthat was carried out within the framework of Iran's Islamic revolution,the embassy bombing represented the first time America hadbeen so directly and bloodily targeted by Islamic terrorists for its militaryinvolvement in the Middle East.It's impossible to see why the United States was such an unwelcomeforce without an understanding of the history of Lebanon andthe surrounding region, and of American and Western involvementin the politics of the Middle East in general. Though Lebanon hasexisted in one form or another since the ninth century b.c., the moderncountry of Lebanon was not established until 1920, when it wasgranted to the French as part of a system of mandates established forthe administration of former Turkish and German territories followingWorld War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, almostall of what we think of as the modern Middle East was shapedby these mandates.America's first direct intervention in Lebanese politics came in1946. During World War II, Lebanon had been declared a free statein order to liberate it from Vichy control. But when, after the war,Lebanon eventually moved toward full independence, the...

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