SFFS: Snippet #6 from Atomic Zion

IN HONOR OF MY DAD'S BIRTHDAY TODAY!



Atomic Zion



Delving further into chapter two of my SF Thriller, Atomic Zion, we continue with Marcos Skovasja in Prague.



DESCRIPTION:

Atomic Zion was influenced by my time as the Educational Marketing Director at Frank Lloyd Wright's House on Kentuck Knob and by reading stories from Michael Crichton, Robert Ludlum, James Rollins, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.



Back Cover Blurb...



On the night of his 92nd birthday, a former Wright Apprentice is thrown from the fifth floor of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The only clue to clear his grandson of the murder is a note written in Navajo code which warns "The Bear has awakened."



These four words throw Nick Vanko into the middle of a decades old international cover-up where Wright Apprentices encoded WWII-era secrets about genetic experimentation into their blueprints. In order to stop a being who isn't quite human from unleashing a biological weapon upon the U.S., Nick must find Broadacre City, the fabled utopia designed by Wright, but supposedly never built. Searching by his side are an old Navajo CodeTalker, a woman who sees emotions as colors, and a Mossad agent who is really working for the Russian mafia. But can Vanko trust any of them?

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SNIPPET #6:

His eyes scanned the same fading graffiti it did everyday on the looming walls--messages of rebellion and dissatisfaction and stenciled images of Kafka signed with secret names only other vandals recognized.



The street took a bend to the right where stone and brick giants pressed toward one another, blocking out the sky as they watched Marcos pass. The lonesome brewery waited up ahead, crouched between an abandoned rectory and the end of the city.



Fermenting hops permeated the air the closer he drew.



Shadows, fragmented into every hue of grey, dappled the brewery door.



Operational for nearly one hundred fifty years, Plivek's Brewery showed an evolution of style evident among its hodgepodge pieces. Part of it pretended to be a castle with two asymmetrical rounded towers capped in terra cotta and eroding copper finials in the form of flying beasts. Marcos' boss told him this stuccoed addition came early during the present century, while the main section with its weathered wood rubbed black with preserving oil retained the long eaves and vertical lines of architecture dating well beyond the brewery's occupation.



Yet even in that small time, Plivek's, like Prague itself, had survived many occupiers, including the Soviets. If only he and other Czechs could survive the mafia, men like his boss, Dmitri Crenov, who were part of a new wave of Russian oppressors rising out of the rubble of Communism.



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