Sam Archer

It's New Year's Eve. A major terrorist cell is planning a series of attacks across London over the next 48 hours. The government has surveillance on the group, a man undercover, and prepare to move in, to take out the terrorists before they can strike. But they lose contact with their inside man. And the cell vanishes into thin air, dispersing into the streets, armed and intent on completing their assault on London. The best counterterrorist teams in the country are told to take them down before it's too late.

New York City. Summer. A series of violent and highly successful bank robberies have been carried out across the city, all by the same five-man team. Millions of dollars have been stolen. The thieves are slick, efficient, well organized, and vicious. The FBI are getting nowhere in tracking them down. With pressure from Washington mounting and the heists continuing, the Feds desperately search for any leads. Across the city Sam Archer is in town for a funeral. At the service he is approached by an old family friend who works out of the FBI's New York office.

Young counterterrorist cop Sam Archer arrives for work at the Armed Response Unit expecting a quiet day. But unbeknownst to him, a storm is coming. Three men have already been killed that morning. One committed suicide by the River Thames. Another was strangled in his car in Washington, DC. And the third was shot in the face in his high-rise New York apartment as he slept. The deaths seem random, thousands of miles apart. But they are all connected - by a shocking event 15 years ago.

On a cold December morning in New York City, a man is found dead in Central Park. There are no knife or gunshot wounds to his body and no signs of violence. But beside the body is a box containing a cracked vial. Suspecting he died from some sort of biological attack, a lab team screen the body. What they find is deeply unsettling and terrifying.

NYPD Detective Sam Archer is on his way home on a Sunday afternoon in New York City. He's been out of the field for over three months but has just been cleared to return to duty. Sitting on a bench in the Upper West Side, Archer sees something totally unexpected. Two men are crossing the street in front of him, heading quickly toward another group climbing into a car. All are heavily armed and all hell breaks loose as a ferocious gunfight erupts, shattering the peaceful afternoon.

NYPD Third Grade Detective Sam Archer and Alice Vargas are working in the NYPD Counter-Terrorism Bureau and also living together. However, things between them are strained; both are struggling to deal with the aftermath of a terrifying ordeal in a Harlem tenement block the day they met. Before long, the tension between them boils over, and Vargas walks out, going to Spain to visit family. Seven days later, Archer still hasn't heard a peep from her.

A commercial plane carrying almost two hundred people crashes into the Atlantic Ocean. Eyewitnesses on a yacht say the flight, bound for the United States from Portugal, was on fire as it fell from the sky. The search is on to find the wreckage. Seventy two hours later, another plane goes missing, American Airlines 44, bound for New York from Paris, France; with terrorism now suspected, the NYPD’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau are asked for their assistance. The scale of the case and the distances involved are factors Sergeant Matt Shepherd’s team have never encountered before.

On one of the hottest nights ever recorded in New York City, two major events take place: a city-wide power outage, and a woman is shot dead in an empty pool in Astoria Park. She’s a fellow NYPD detective and close friend of Sam Archer. It turns out the rest of her police team have disappeared and a call comes into the Counter-Terrorism Bureau the following morning. The three detectives have been kidnapped and a high ransom demand is made.

It’s early July and across the United States, people are preparing for the upcoming Independence Day holiday. Millions of children are on summer break from school. One of them is Isabel Vargas. At a fair on Long Island, New York, Isabel avoids death by a millimeter when a knife buries itself into a wall behind her. Only NYPD Detective Sam Archer and his small circle of colleagues know why she may have been targeted; Isabel is the daughter of a former Manhattan mafioso, killed three years earlier along with his entire family apart from the girl.

Sam Archer is out of town on a break from his duties in the NYPD when he receives a call from his detective-sergeant back in New York. A former foe of theirs currently serving a life term has repeatedly been getting attacked by other inmates, so the Bureau of Prisons has arranged for him to be transferred from a US Penitentiary in Virginia to another facility seven hours away. Not only was the man responsible for the death of a fellow detective of Archer’s, he’s now saying he has some important information to share.