Arbat Square and Plaza Mayor: Two Stories of Our Time

Author: John Halbert

ISBN 9781621373629 (softcover)

1180 pages

ARBAT SQUARE
Oil trader Kip Leeds goes on a dangerous journey to Africa where he comes into twenty-million dollars of "black money”. When he returns home to Texas, he is followed. 

In Moscow, Terenty Susiov, a rising young Soviet Military Intelligence officer, attends a secret Special Forces academy, training for an intense mission to penetrate the United States. He and his fellow officer friend become romantically involved with two cousins. As the Soviet Union implodes, the foursome become enmeshed in the tumultuous events around Arbat Square as revolution rages and Boris Yeltsin climbs onto a tank to rally the citizens. 

Leonid Retchko, an unprincipled former Soviet general, masterminds an international crime Cartel that supplies weapons and training to subversive and terrorist groups whose malign influence will extend all the way to the "Twin Towers" of Manhattan, USA. 

The Cartel's reach and power are laying the groundwork for the diplomatic, political, and military upheavals that the world now faces. 

This far-ranging novel of intrigue, action, adventure, and romance takes the reader into the inner workings of the "other" side—to familiar people, places and events in this fast-paced "Story of Our Time" that continues in the second volume, PLAZA MAYOR. 

PLAZA MAYOR
Continuing from the first volume, ARBAT SQUARE. In this wide-ranging novel of action, intrigue, adventure, romance and redemption, young California marketing executive Larry Landay takes a shipment of sophisticated electronics to Africa. There, he encounters a worldwide crime cartel, supplying weapons and training to international terrorists, renegade governments, and criminals engaged in human trafficking. 

The American Investigation Agency joins forces with the Russian Security Service and International Police to try to stop the cartel’s mastermind, a former Soviet general allied with a mysterious and wealthy Middle-Easterner who, using cutting-edge technology and taking advantage of porous U.S. borders, seeks to install suitcase-sized nuclear devices and other sophisticated weapons in American cities and to destroy important landmarks. This “Conspiracy Thriller” offers surprising perspectives of the "other side” and ranges from Texas, to Moscow, to Havana, to Nigeria, to the drug cartels of Colombia and to Madrid, where the subjects—-most of whom do not know each other but whose lives are nevertheless inexorably intertwined—are brought together at historic "Plaza Mayor" for the world-shaking climax.