Brotherly love can bind men together, but there's no force as strong as brotherly hate, especially when those brothers can pull the strings of power. Deep inside Joseph Schneider's code was a secret that had been buried for 70 years. A secret that would transcend three generations and rear its ugly face in Paul Trifthauser's life. Why do the sons and grandsons of powerful men hate each other? Why do they try to kill each other? What is it about blood that makes it spill so easily between people that are so close? Paul Trifthauser didn't know. The only thing he did know was that to win he had to do something he loathed. He had to become his grandfather.
About the Author: Where do I start? I first met Trifthauser in a bar in Pattaya, Thailand in June of 1984. He was 24 and I, a bit older. He was with a woman named Miko, a half-Vietnamese half-American girl who had the sweetest smile you could imagine. He and I were oilfield workers. We worked together on a rig that was 400 miles from literally anything and the sand dunes, a hundred feet high. If you didn't come in by plane, it took weeks to get there. But on one of the last nights we were there, a Bedouin tribe camped within a few hundred's yards of our camp, and later that night, a rig hand came to our truck and said the Bedouins wanted to talk with Trifthauser and Helmuth. No one ever talked to Bedouins. I asked Trifthauser if I could tag along and he said, no, as if I was crazy for asking. He and his German operator were the only westerners I had ever known that had any relations with Bedouins, and even then, not these Bedouins. These were the rarest of the rare, brutal men that appeared almost like warriors, with leathered faces and deep set eyes. Men that never knew civilization. It was then that I started to realize that Trifthauser was different and his crew was also. Why they were so secretive, I never knew, but Trifthauser did get me into his Legion Post, China Post One in Bangkok and got me in as an insider. From here, I was able to launch the business I have today, which I won't go into detail about. And I met him several times over the years, mostly in Asia. I knew he had stopped seeing Miko and I knew of his troubles in Saudi. I met him in Bremen when Helmuth died, like many German's, of lung cancer. It was only many years later, when he moved to Zurich that our paths crossed again. How he found out where I lived is beyond me, but he showed up on my doorstep a few times, each time a little bit more paranoid than the time before. Who is Paul Trifthauser? God only knows but one thing I do know. All of his life, he's had to stay one step ahead of somebody or something. I don't know who or what that is, but I know it doesn't quit. Somewhere, he learned something he should have never learned. The fact that he's still alive, if he is still alive, is a miracle.