Where Vultures Gather

WHERE VULTURES GATHER wends through a forgotten past that implores us to rethink our present. Its real-world premise is known only to a select The threads that stitch together today’s headlines lead not back to a fateful day in 2001 but to an overlooked moment a decade earlier, when the ways of modern insurgency were forged, when North Korea schemed to cripple the global economy, and when Pakistan built a secret arsenal of ballistic missiles. VULTURES opens in a pivotal time and place—the early 1990s in the Philippines, a country beset by guerrilla warfare, political assassinations, terrorist attacks, and rampant corruption. In the midst of this turmoil an unassuming man arrives. America’s enemies, who thrive in Manila’s mayhem, have no reason to notice him. But the man, whose bland name belies his exotic ancestry, holds a prosaic job that obscures his esoteric profession. Carl Nyquist is a deep-cover spy and he took this risky mission for very personal reasons. VULTURES traces the tangled stories of three men, two women, and a young girl. Though separated by a vast gulf of culture and circumstance, two of the men, Carl and an insurgent named Sixto Galang, are driven by eerily similar dark motives, and they join forces to exact revenge against the third, a senior guerrilla named José Aguilar. José’s savagery was born not of innate sadism but of hidden wounds not unlike those of his pursuers. One of the women, Pawaya, whose remote mountain homeland holds the key to deliverance, suffers grievous injuries to body and spirit. Against poor odds she struggles to overcome the daunting challenges before her. The other woman, long dead, haunts her lover, José, and compels him to victimize as she was once victimized. The girl, Riza, faces an early death from a conspiracy of injustice and neglect. Apart from striving to vanquish their common foe, Sixto and Carl seek a restitution that will save her life. VULTURES brims with clandestine tradecraft practices, keen insights into the psyche of a professional assassin, vivid descriptions of episodic PTSD, and noisome issues of enduring geopolitical relevance. It depicts not spy fantasy but espionage reality, as told by an experienced practitioner.