One Minute to Midnight - Vincent dePaul Lupiano - Bog

Rayne Foster is on a covert mission to surveil the estate of Florida mafia boss, Donato "Cheese" Chesario. Photographing from a tree in a violent thunderstorm, she spots a camo-clad intruder sneaking into the mobster''s estate using a grappling hook. His intent: steal a box stamped with a Nazi swastika containing an enigmatic object Chesario brought back from Germany after WWII.

Fatal complications slam Rayne with blistering surprise when a rogue FBI agent and his nefarious cohort known as the "Magician," kill their way into the estate to also steal the box. But the object of everyone''s intent has disappeared-an item that, in the wrong hands, will have severe international consequences.

Rayne now senses her CIA field director has duped her. Suddenly, artifice and subterfuge conjoin with thunder and lighting and present a mounting death toll in and around the estate:

Bodyguard cut down in the foyer. One dead.

Mistress slammed by a burst of gunfire from the Magician''s MAC 10 machine pistol. Two dead.

Chesario, refuting any knowledge of the mysterious object, killed by the rogue FBI agent. Three dead.

The camo-clad intruder, meanwhile, has vanished empty-handed into the night.
Rayne finds her CIA handler with a bullet hole in the back of his head and the take-up reel that recorded their transmissions missing. Death toll: four and mounting.

The FBI agent and Magician are confident Rayne or the intruder took the box before they arrived.

As her field director intended, Rayne is now the bait. And she has no idea what is inside the box.