Code Word

Maggie O'Shea, a Boston attorney, private investigator and New Age designer, with a knack for having trouble find her, lands in the middle of an Asian conspiracy to dominate the world when a former lover sends her an encoded computer disk a few hours before his inexplicable death. Maggie knew little of Dai toa Kyoei-ken (the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere), the justification for Japan's "anti-colonial" onslaught into Asia 60 years earlier, until Commander Nick Adams, an intelligence analyst at the Naval War College in Newport, RI, is found floating lifeless under the Newport Bridge. Returning to her native Newport, Maggie finds that local authorities and politicians, the FBI, Naval Intelligence and the Naval Investigative Service have so bungled their investigation of Nick's apparent suicide the truth might never be known. It occurs to her that someone might want it that way. Maggie's twin sister, Michaela, sheds more light and darkness on Nick's death by implicating her ex-husband, Bobby Nathan. Nathan owns a fleet of fishing boats, a trucking company, has Mafia connections in New York's Fulton Market and is suspected of running drugs as well as fresh fish up and down the east coast and to Japan via Fukihara San, a New York import/export agent. Filling in for Michaela on a blind date, Maggie meets Tom Charles, a technical writer for a defense contractor and is attracted to him immediately. Tom, a computer hack, offers to help Maggie decode the disk once she has it, but there's a problem. Tom had an affair with the late Commander's Japanese wife, Kazuko, and, either through accident or by design, he allowed her to obtain some sensitive information on the TOMAHAWK and TRIDENT guidance systems. Maggie wonders if her new love is all he seems to be. The group of Japanese fanatics behind the conspiracy is not satisfied with economic domination; they now plan to subjugate the West militarily by infecting our tactical and strategic weapons systems with a computer virus embedded in software manufactured by Japanese owned/controlled companies that supply chips to the US military. But the Japanese seem to be only a little more competent than the American authorities who are trying to unravel their plan. Mistaking her for Maggie, members of the group abduct Michaela, sweep her away to New York, where Fukihara San tries to force her to turn over the disk and code word. Michaela knows nothing about the disk, but is clever enough to realize she must assume Maggie's identity to save her own skin. Maggie realizes too that she must assume the identity of Michaela to protect her sister. In the process, each twin not only discovers how her other half lives, but how her twin thinks and feels as well. This is an illuminating experience for both twins because Maggie has always gotten by on her brains, whereas, Michaela, with two broken marriages in her past, has always been treated as an object of desire. It is in Michaela's shoes, that Maggie receives a marriage proposal from a powerful U. S. Senator, a man who may very well hold the key to Nick's death and Michaela's salvation. Romance, humor, subversion, murder and incompetence attend Maggie in her attempt to save her own life, that of her sister, and the destiny of her country.