The Devil Within Us

The Devil Within Us is a fast paced thriller set in 1933. A man calling himself Mephistopheles resides in a mountain fortress on the border of both Canada and the USA. He threatens world peace with an arsenal of advanced weaponry, including missiles that can reach the nearby cities of Vancouver and Seattle. Several foreign agents come together in an alliance of expediency. Some, like the British Agent Doc Hunter, want to stop Mephistopheles, others like Hartmann of the German Abwehr, want access to his weapons only. The Italian assassin, Artemisia Montessori, has a very different agenda. What they all find is that behind the mask of Mephistopheles lies an even greater mystery. A man known as the Philosopher has been walking the Earth and wherever he goes people disappear. Their wealth and possessions along with them. Any who try to interfere with the Philosopher fall foul of a group called Argus Panoptes who are quick to kidnap and kill his enemies. From the snow covered mountain lair of Mephistopheles to the steaming jungles of South America the trail leads a winding path. Many who follow it die along the way. Artemisia was destined to become a member of Roman high society before she became an agent of the Italian Military Intelligence Service. Beautiful and dangerous, she has her own reasons for seeking out the truth behind the mystery of the Philosopher. She has killed many people and feels a vast and empty void is growing between herself and other human beings. She is beginning to wonder if she can ever be normal again. When she teams up with Doc Hunter it seems more like an act of redemption than anything else. For his part, Hunter appears to the world to be the eugenic superman that he is touted to be. Tall, brave, highly intelligent, stronger than most men can ever be, nevertheless, he has his own reasons for pursuing this mission and they have far less to do with the Philosopher than it first seems. Agent Frasier of American Navy Intelligence is a man driven to show that he can keep pace with the best. Confident in the concrete jungle of New York he struggles to come to terms with the more dangerous jungles of South America. The three of them plunge into the darkness of this tale, only to find that it is not necessarily they who carry the light. What begins as an apparently simple mission to neutralise a madman becomes a journey of discovery that might very well prove to be the saving of humanity.