“The Awakening” – Exclusive Short Story

I wrote an exclusive short story for Borders.com based on Nick Horrigan, my protagonist in Trust No One. The book opens with Nick getting dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by a SWAT team and led downstairs to a waiting Black Hawk. He is told by the agent-in-charge that a terrorist has seized control of a nuclear power plant. And the man says he’ll ONLY talk to Nick. (Read the first chapter here.) But as we delve into Nick’s story, we realize that he was driven from LA as a young man, and the current catastrophe is linked to, as the back of the book declaims, secrets from his past. Well, I kept getting an itch to write another little piece of Nick’s story. When he was on the run as a young man, living in Alaska, there is a particular moment when he awakens and decides to start making his way back to Los Angeles, to his mother, to the life that was taken away from him. “The Awakening” is the story of that moment.