About America at Night





It is the summer of 2004, on what is supposed to be the first day of the rest of Larry Kolb's life—after having intentionally blown his cover as a spy, he'd hoped to leave behind the world of espionage and international intrigue forever. But over lunch with an old friend, one thing leads to another and suddenly he's being asked by a high-level Department of Homeland Security official to assist in a case that has troubled government security agencies for the past three years.

Kolb, it seems, is the only person the government can find who knows much of anything about one Robert Sensi. Though Sensi was once an operative of the CIA and an official of the Republican National Committee, and has twice served time in federal prison for embezzlement and fraud, all the government's databases seem to have been scrubbed clean of information about him. And now Sensi's at the center of a Homeland Security counterterrorism investigation, along with a mysterious partner, whom no one in the government has been able to identify, or even photograph, despite three years of trying.

Kolb's hopes of disentangling himself from the world of espionage forgotten, he is plunged headlong into an investigation that leads to a dark trail of crimes and terrorists, mysterious deaths, fugitive billionaires, inept federal agencies, and corruption at the highest levels. A spectacular arrest is made, and the case is officially closed.

But something still feels amiss, and when Kolb lays out all the relevant files and begins to connect the dots, he realizes that these two con men have been plotting something even more sinister, playing for the highest possible political stakes—and that neither Kolb's work nor the government's efforts have done anything to avert it. So while the clock is ticking, Kolb must convince some of the most important people in the country about what he's discovered, and keep himself alive while doing it.

In this shocking and illuminating book, Larry Kolb shows how one well-informed individual did what all of our security agencies could not. He reveals the methods by which a trained intelligence operative looks at the world and sees what others don't see. And he tells a breathtakingly suspenseful story of corruption and intrigue—of the way power and money really work—that would be unbelievable were it not intensively documented and corroborated from start to finish.