Mason Quantrell, owner of a rival company, is more interested in fat contracts than useful intelligence. Peter Bunting, chief of a private-security company, is the genius behind the Wall and the Analyst. With the Wall providing a singular source of accurate information, the government's alphabet departments are losing funding, especially Homeland Security, the fiefdom of manipulatively ambitious Ellen Foster. Baldacci's realistic plot blends patriotism and naked ambition, greed and paranoia and bureaucratic infighting. On their way to meet Bergin at the prison in Maine, King and Maxwell happen upon Bergin sitting in his vehicle on an isolated road, emergency lights flashing, murdered. King has agreed to investigate the murders at the behest of defense attorney Ted Bergin, his beloved mentor. ) drops Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, Secret Service agents turned private investigators, into the mess. The Analyst, once an anonymous IRS bureaucrat with an eidetic memory and a strangely powerful intellect, now sits mute in a federal supermax prison, an accused serial killer. In a terrifying confrontation that will push Sean and Michelle to their limits, the duo may be permanently parted.To keep al-Qaeda zealots, megalomaniac North Koreans with nukes and other bad guys at bay, gigabytes of real-time intelligence stream to the Wall, there to be collated and conceptualized by one man, the Analyst. Their persistence puts them on a collision course with the highest levels of the government and the darkest corners of power. It is now up to them to ask the questions no one seems to want answered: Is Roy a killer? Who murdered Bergin? The more they dig into Roy's past, the more they encounter obstacles, half-truths, dead-ends, false friends, and escalating threats from every direction. But their investigation is derailed when Sean and Michelle find Bergin murdered. Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are called in by Roy's attorney, Sean's old friend and mentor Ted Bergin, to help work the case. , two private investigators dig into a killer's past-but when their search threatens powerful enemies, it could cost them their lives.Įdgar Roy-an alleged serial killer-is awaiting trial. Bestselling thriller that inspired the TV series

The Sixth Man by David Baldacci