A neighbor returns a borrowed umbrella. Four days later, the man who touched it is dead. The death certificate says cardiac arrest. The umbrella was the weapon.
The killer is one of four intelligence operatives deployed to American soil with a single mission: raise a child as a weapon. Train them through love. Aim them at the presidency. And accept that when the program succeeds, no one — not the operatives, not their families, not the children — will be allowed to survive.
Authorized in 1983 by the intelligence chiefs of Russia, China, and North Korea, the program spans forty-five years, four families, and four children born as American citizens who will never know they were designed. Coordinating them all from a building whose address exists in no directory: one man, whose capacity for patience is matched only by his capacity for violence.
Each family believes their child is the only one. None of them know what the coordinator knows: when the program is complete, everyone is expendable.
Origins is the prequel novella to The Sleeper Network series.
