Larry Bond's First Team: Soul of the Assassin

This is techno-thriller craft at full speed: a dead officer's hidden flash drive, a bioweapon moving through Vienna and Istanbul, and a duel with a ghost from the KGB. Larry Bond, co-author of Red Storm Rising, keeps the tradecraft specific and the stakes biological. Read it if you like clean operational detail, a team that bleeds when it makes mistakes, and a villain who leaves a single white rose as his signature.

1. 1

   Act 1

   A Body in Rome, a Drive in the Wall

   Rome opens the book with a corpse. CIA officer Bob Ferguson is murdered in his own apartment, and the woman who finds him—his contact, Gianna—does the only sensible thing and runs. Back at Langley, Deputy Director of Operations Thomas Ciello gathers Ferguson's old unit, the First Team: Stephen Rankin, James Corrigan, and Elizabeth Anthony. Their friend and colleague is dead, and the hit looks professional from the start. When the team lands in Rome and walks through the apartment, they see the marks of a trained killer—and Rankin finds what the assassins missed: a hidden flash drive Ferguson left behind. Encrypted files on it point to Dr. Ali Reza Kazemi, an Iranian scientist working on a biological weapon, and make one thing brutally clear: Ferguson was tracking Kazemi when he died. The killer's work, in other words, was about silencing exactly this trail. Meanwhile in Tehran, Kazemi meets the man guarding that secret—a figure known only as the Assassin, a legendary killer who has never been photographed, tasked with eliminating anyone who threatens the bioweapon project. The team follows Ferguson's lead to Vienna, where they surveil a meeting between an Iranian intelligence officer and a European middleman arranging travel documents for Kazemi. Corrigan tails the middleman to a warehouse—and walks into an ambush. He kills two attackers but is severely wounded; Rankin and Anthony drag him out, and he's flown back to the U.S. for treatment. The First Team is down a man before the real hunt has even begun.

2. 2

   Act 2

   Hawk Joins, the Plague Moves

   With Corrigan in a hospital bed, Ciello fills the gap with a young analyst named David 'Hawk' Hawkins, an expert in Iranian networks, who joins Rankin and Anthony in Istanbul. There the team intercepts a courier carrying a sample of the bioweapon—a genetically modified strain of plague—and learns it is headed to a lab in Syria for final testing. The clock is now real: a live plague strain is moving across borders. The Assassin is moving too. He kills the Vienna middleman to cover his tracks, then flies to Damascus, and the First Team tracks his alias only to realize he is always one step ahead of them. Every move they make, he has already anticipated. In Damascus, Rankin and Anthony pose as journalists to get close to a Syrian scientist linked to the bioweapon lab, while Hawk runs technical surveillance from a safe house. The pieces come together: the lab is in a remote village near Palmyra. They plan a raid—but their Syrian contact is killed by the Assassin, who leaves a calling card: a single white rose. The message is unmistakable. He knows they are coming, and he wants them to know it.

3. 3

   Act 3

   The Lab Near Palmyra

   Night falls over the lab, and Rankin and Anthony go in. Inside, they find Dr. Kazemi personally overseeing the weaponization of the plague strain—this is the end of Ferguson's trail, live and breathing. Anthony downloads data while Rankin plants explosives; the plan is to take the science and destroy the facility. Then the Assassin appears in the lab and confronts Rankin. The fight is brutal, hand-to-hand, no gadgets, no distance—just two trained men trying to kill each other in a sealed room. Rankin wins. But the Assassin, dying, triggers a containment breach that releases the plague inside the sealed lab. Rankin and Anthony run, and the explosives detonate behind them, destroying the lab and the plague samples. Dr. Kazemi is killed in the blast. Ferguson's killer is avenged, the weapon is ash, and the team walks out of a collapsing building with the data that started it all.

4. 4

   Act 4

   The Rose That Wouldn't Die

   Back in the U.S., the team debriefs, and Hawk digs into the recovered data. What he finds changes the mission: the Iranian bioweapon program was funded by a rogue faction within the Russian government. Ciello then reveals who the Assassin was—Yuri Volkov, a former KGB operative long thought dead. And there is a sliver of doubt: his body was never recovered from the lab ruins. In a Virginia hospital, Corrigan, still recovering from the warehouse ambush, gets a visit from Rankin. Corrigan says, 'You got him. That's all that matters.' Rankin replies, 'We got him. Team effort.' It is the closest the book comes to a victory lap—but the body they never found hangs over it. The team is given a new mission: track the Russian financiers of the bioweapon program. The novel ends with Rankin, Anthony, and Hawk boarding a plane to Moscow, the war moving to a bigger stage.

• SStephen RankinFirst Team's field leader and the one who finds Ferguson's hidden flash drive. He kills the Assassin in a brutal hand-to-hand fight in the plague lab—and walks out of the blast that ends the bioweapon.
• EElizabeth AnthonyFirst Team's operator who extracts the wounded Corrigan, poses as a journalist in Damascus, and downloads the lab's data while Rankin plants explosives. She escapes the containment breach with Rankin.
• JJames CorriganFirst Team member ambushed at a Vienna warehouse; he kills two attackers but is severely wounded and flown back to the U.S. He watches the finale from a hospital bed.
• DDavid 'Hawk' HawkinsYoung analyst and Iranian-networks expert brought in to replace Corrigan. He runs technical surveillance from a Damascus safe house and uncovers the Russian funding in the recovered data.
• BBob FergusonThe CIA officer murdered in his Rome apartment. His hidden flash drive is the map the whole mission follows.
• TThe Assassin / Yuri VolkovA legendary, never-photographed killer guarding the bioweapon project, who leaves a single white rose as a calling card. He is revealed to be Yuri Volkov, a former KGB operative long thought dead—and his body is never recovered.
• DDr. Ali Reza KazemiIranian scientist building a genetically modified plague, killed in the lab blast he helped arm.
• TThomas CielloCIA Deputy Director of Operations who briefs the First Team, assigns Hawk, and reveals Volkov's identity.

The white rose

The Assassin's calling card, left on the team's killed Syrian contact near Palmyra. It is elegance attached to murder—a signature that says he was here, he chose this, and he wants you to know. When his body is never recovered from the lab ruins, the rose's meaning sharpens: some signatures refuse to be buried.

The flash drive

Ferguson's hidden legacy in his Rome apartment—the dead man's hand reaching forward. It carries the encrypted trail to Kazemi and drives every move the First Team makes. Its fate mirrors the mission: small, fragile, easily missed, but holding everything.

The sealed lab

The bioweapon project's heart near Palmyra, where Kazemi weaponizes the plague. It is designed to contain the worst of what it holds, yet one dying man's hand breaches it. Its destruction by explosives mirrors the team's only real option against the plague: not capture, but annihilation.

The photograph that never was

The Assassin has never been photographed—identity itself is his armor. When Ciello names him as Yuri Volkov, a former KGB operative long thought dead, the unphotographed man finally gets a name, but no confirmed corpse. The symbol's fate mirrors the ending: knowledge arrives just before doubt does.

The ending refuses to close cleanly. Rankin kills the Assassin, the lab burns, Kazemi dies, and Corrigan gets his reassurance—'You got him. That's all that matters.' But Ciello's admission that the body was never recovered from the ruins leaves a sliver of doubt that the book deliberately does not resolve. Read one way, the doubt is honest tradecraft: professionals confirm kills, and this one can't be confirmed. Read another, it is a door left open—the unphotographed man who was long thought dead once before could be so again. What the ending does resolve is direction. Hawk's discovery that a rogue faction within the Russian government funded the program reframes everything the team just survived as one node of a larger network, and the final image—Rankin, Anthony, and Hawk boarding a plane to Moscow—turns a completed mission into the opening move of a bigger one. It lands because victory and escalation arrive in the same breath: the plague is ash, and the war over who builds the next one is just starting.

1. 1.The Assassin is never photographed and his body is never recovered—does the book's refusal to confirm his death strengthen or cheapen Rankin's victory?
2. 2.Ferguson dies in chapter one but drives the entire plot through his flash drive. What does the novel say about whether individual officers matter in institutional intelligence work?
3. 3.The bioweapon can only be destroyed, not captured. Is the lab raid—explosives, a plague breach, Kazemi's death—a success, a near-catastrophe, or both?

Readers who want their thrillers operational—flash drives, couriers, safe houses, and a raid that goes wrong in a specific, biological way. Also for anyone who liked Red Storm Rising's clean cause-and-effect and wants a smaller, sharper team-vs-killer version of it.

FAQ