The US President in danger? You’ve never seen it like this before. What happens when trained killers seize world leaders?
Blood Summit: the premise
The US President, British Prime Minister, German Chancellor, Russian President and other G8 leaders are at a summit in Berlin. Terrorists strike, taking the world’s leaders hostage.
Rescue is impossible.
One after another, hostages are executed at point-blank range, killings streamed live, bodies left on show for fifteen minutes to prove that they are dead.
The US President in danger
Then the U.S. President is thrown into the killing chair – and shots ring out.
Who is to blame for this cataclysm? Who can resolve the crisis – against a background of terrorist demands which seem impossible to meet, yet which have demonstrators massing outside the Reichstag to support the hostage-takers?
Step forward Helen Gale, diplomat at the British Embassy responsible for summit security. Her journalist husband is a hostage in the embassy. Her lover is deputy head of the elite Summit Security Unit, blamed, like Helen, for the unfolding disaster.
Only Helen’s friend, U.S. diplomat Blore Harl; petite, dark-haired SAS Captain Elle Morgan; and mysterious Georgian business tycoon Oleg Sukanashvili stand behind Helen as she enters the shattered hulk of the Reichstag to stop a bloodbath.
Blood Summit and the spirit of Berlin
I wrote Blood Summit when I lived in Berlin. The ghosts of the past haunt the city. Totalitarianism, war and genocide. Air-raids, occupation and suffering. The Berlin Wall, surveillance and spy-swaps. Finally, since 1989, a city reunified and at peace for the first time in half a century.
At the heart of all this squats the mighty Reichstag building. Stormed by the Red Army as the Third Reich crumbled then left empty for decades, the Reichstag has been restored as the parliament of a reunited Germany.
A symbol of democracy, transparency and hope.
You can visit the restaurant on the roof; climb a staircase to a viewing platform; and stare down, through a bulletproof glass ceiling, into the debating chamber far below.
Can a building be secure, yet exposed? Accessible, yet impenetrable? Open, yet sealed?
What, I thought, if violence and death were to stalk this symbol again? What if a brilliant mind were to conceive a terrorist strike so audacious that it turned the most secure summit venue in the world into the deadliest trap imaginable?
Welcome to Blood Summit. It’s addictive.
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