ALEX LAW
The American Boys, The Good Physician, The Rat Machine
A CIA officer and the scion of a wealthy blue-blooded American family with ties to the very top. His father is a World War II hero and top dog at the CIA during the Cold War. Alex is handsome, indifferent to his social class, and, despite his various problems, was born to be a spy. He is not physically imposing. He is a lost soul, driven to compete with his war-hero father, but forced to do it in a completely different kind of world: No Good Guys vs. Bad Guys now. Lies, War, Money and Corruption are the players Alex Law battles. It’s an unromantic modern landscape where the biggest, baddest, and cruelest dogs rule. It is our world, like it or not. Shoot straight and think quick, or die.
BUTCH NICKELS
The American Boys, The Good Physician, The Rat Machine
CIA officer, considered a “knuckle-dragger” and thug by the CIA. He is a government hitman and very un-cool. His father was a steel worker. Butch entered the Marine Corps and went to Vietnam as a second lieutenant. He survived the war physically, but was crippled emotionally. He’s a volcano. He is in the Spy Business which means he is corruptible. He has one friend in the world—Alex Law. The two men will share thirty years of spying, lying and killing together. They are truly brothers in arms. They are complete opposites in every possible way. Butch is to be feared. The terrible irony is that Butch Nickels just wanted a wife, children, and a white picket fence. He’ll never have them.
GEMMA DEL TORRE
The Rat Machine
“Every creature has it’s own reason to be,” is Gemma’s philosophy. A young Italian university student in love with the ideals of Social Equality and the Rights Of Man; she’s an idealist, a Goethe type. She is also in love with the wrong man. She’s gone to work for the KGB, not because she’s a pawn in the Cold War or for money, but because she believes in the World Revolution. Her father was murdered by the fascists in Spain, something she can not forget. Who could? She is unafraid of death, perhaps because she believes in the beauty of life. In The Rat Machine, Gemma will end up fighting, not on the side of the Russian KGB, or the CIA, but on the side of her deep passion for one man. Every creature has it’s own reason to be in love.
MALCOLM LAW
The American Boys, The Rat Machine
From America’s One Percent. Old-school cold warrior and war hero—looks like Thor. Malcolm parachuted into the Eastern Front in Russia during the Second World War as part of an OSS team at age twenty and operated with the resistance. He learned, to his horror, what the Nazis were capable of, and that Communists were actually just human beings fighting for their lives. He was assigned to Operation Paperclip: America’s top secret intelligence operation to import Nazi scientists into the US immediately after the war—despite being war criminals. Malcolm is uneasy, he should be. He realizes at the beginning of The Rat Machine that the old days of importing Nazis into the US has come back to bite the CIA, MI6 and even the KGB in the ass. He risks his life to stop the take over of CIA using the one person he shouldn’t use as bait: his own son. Biblical.
SONNY DELMONICO
The Rat Machine
He has many aliases. But this is what is known as fact: Englishman born to Sicilian parents in the East End of London—a Cockney. Fought in Europe at age seventeen with the British Army during the Second World War. Lost an eye when he asked the wrong man for a date in a bar in Crete. He wears an eye patch now. He is an unrepentant homosexual and serious gangster who has survived the unforgiving world of the international heroin business. He is a made man in the Sicilian Mafia, as was his father before him. He is a fixer and a Go-To Guy used by various intelligence agencies, including CIA. He lives in Southern Spain and he is no one’s fool. If you want large quantities of heroin moved to New York or London, by all means, call Sonny and leave a message at a bar in Andalucia.