Codebreaker
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Meg Parrish, a cryptographer for NSA's Central Security Service in Portland, Oregon, is both brilliant and troubled. Gifted in her ability to recognize and decipher codes, she is also a woman haunted by a history of tragedies which have occurred at five-year intervals throughout her life. While working undercover at a software engineering firm, Meg manages to break through a series of passwords and retrieve a set of codes that might affect national security. Unknowingly, she has set in motion a series of events that sends her running for her life. As she seeks the truth about the codes, the hunt leads her from Portland to San Francisco and on to Albuquerque. Along the way, she must not only discover the forces that want these codes, but she must overcome the nightmares from her past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taking a page from Helen MacInnes, romance author Myers (Winter Flame; Dark Soldier) has produced a thoroughly modern suspense/chase thriller with a bit of romance. Beautiful federal code-breaker Meg Parrish, working under cover at Signet Corp., a software firm in Portland, Ore., penetrates computer security and copies a database so valuable that the company's CEO, Willis Dent, sends his security chief to kill her and recover the disk. Meg's handsome Signet colleague, Ross Eckland, saves her from rape and murder, and they begin a flight from Signet, from federal intelligence agents and, suddenly, from threatening strangers with mysterious motives and aliases. In their escape across Oregon, California and Arizona, the pair face one danger after another, including pursuit by helicopter and two high-speed car chases. Numerous flashbacks and subplots involve electronic surveillance and tracking, encryption, DNA and genetics research, the federal intelligence community and the ethics of cloning. Once Dent and the evil corporate and federal pursuers get their just deserts, Meg and Ross finally realize they're probably in love. Myers is good at describing scenery and interiors and at explaining many small tricks, including how to make an egg sound like an exploding bomb. However, readers may need a notepad to keep track of the characters and their aliases. Simpler would have been better.
