He wants you to know him, maybe even admire him...

"A natural killer," his mentor--a middleman named Vespucci--once said he was. He is the consummate assassin, at the top of his form, immune to the psychological strains of his chosen profession. He is what the Russians call a Silver Bear. He calls himself Columbus.

It's the name a middleman gave him, ten years ago, when he discovered a dark, new world of fences, clients, marks, jobs, jack. Not that his real name meant much to him anyway. He never knew his father or his mother, a prostitute who became dangerously involved with an earnest young congressman named Abe Mann, then a rising political star. The magnetic Abe Mann has since become the Speaker of the House. He is currently running for his party's nomination in an exhausting presidential campaign, weaving his way across the country. Columbus is not far behind.

But as Columbus pieces together his past and prepares the seamless assassination of his mark, the criminal underworld he has always ruled begins unraveling violently around him in this tight and chilling debut that has been compared to The Manchurian Candidate and The Day of the Jackal.