Robin Monarch is a man with a complicated, secret past and a very grim future. Currently locked up in the USDB—the military supermax prison known as Leavenworth—the CIA offers Monarch one shot at freedom and a pardon. All he has to do is steal something from a highly secure position at ground zero of a warzone and escape undetected.

But this isn't Monarch's first time at this sort of dance—as an orphaned teen scraping for survival on the streets of Buenos Aires, he was involved with the Fraternidad de Ladrones—the Brotherhood that schooled him the art of deception and survival. But his initiation rite is to take all the skills he has learned, and all the nerve he possesses, and steal something of great value under impossible circumstances.

In both cases, success will require everything he has—skill, wit, endurance, and intelligence—and means survival and freedom. And failure? failure is to lose all that he has.

Introducing Robin Monarch ("a Jason Bourne for the new millenium", says James Rollins) in the first in a series of standalone short stories. Think Bourne. Think Bond. Think better.