Dan Kemp takes you along for a deep dive into a shadowy world of espionage, private military contractors, criminal organizations and government agencies where the good guys and bad guys are often one and the same.

If you had enough capacity for violence to seize a billion dollars from a powerful drug cartel, would you do it?

The Professor has problems, and not just what decades of soldiering did to his back and his knees. His boss just died, leaving him as CEO of the extremely discreet intelligence contractor Athenaeum, Incorporated. His old buddy the Operations Director is a highly skilled Army Ranger veteran but his finance chief is slightly unhinged and spends her money on highly inappropriate work outfits. The surviving old men on the Board of Directors are stuck in the 1970s. Running Athenaeum out of an old Cold War bunker and keeping their roster of experts together is expensive, but the government contracts are drying up or going to bigger, flashier corporate players.

Then an intercepted phone call puts them on the trail of a drug cartel’s shipping container of “maybe” a billion dollars in cash, so its command decision time.

• Door Number One, ignore it. But… a billion dollars with a capital B.
• Door Number Two, tell the Feds. But that might bring official notice to the shady intelligence gathering they have been paying Athenaeum for all these years.
• Or open Door Number Three, which might get them all killed, or worse.