“Baya comes from the island of Sumatra,” Torino said, “where they have saltwater crocodiles over twenty feet long. They call Baya ‘the Crocodile’ because the Indonesian word for crocodile is buaya. But the name would work even without the wordplay.”
This is from the new Nick Mason book, An Honorable Assassin (coming August 27, 2024 from Blackstone), and when your target is compared to a twenty-foot-long crocodile, you know you’re in for an interesting ride. But Nick Mason was sent to the other side of the world specifically to hunt down Hashim Baya – a man who invests in international terrorism like it’s just another commodity – and nobody else.
At the beginning of the first book in the series (The Second Life of Nick Mason), Mason was five years into a 25-year sentence in federal prison, until he suddenly found himself walking out the front gates – and into a life of luxury, with a high-end condo on Chicago’s North Side, a 1968 390 FT Fastback Mustang, and $10,000 in cash in a safe deposit box on the first of every month. But as the man who picked up Mason from the prison made crystal clear:
“This isn’t freedom. It’s mobility. Don’t get those two things confused.”
Because whenever his cell phone rang, day or night, Mason had to answer it and follow whatever order he was given. That’s the deal he made with Darius Cole, a criminal mastermind serving a double-life term who still runs an empire from his prison cell.
Mason was desperate to rebuild a life with his daughter and ex-wife, even as he was forced to commit increasingly brutal and dangerous crimes. Until, near the end of second book (Exit Strategy), Mason finally let himself believe, if just for one fleeting moment, that he had won his freedom.
But could life ever be that simple, or that easy? Freeing himself from one boss just meant that he’s about to meet an even bigger boss, and that’s why the last time we saw Nick Mason, he was getting on a plane to fly halfway around the world to Jakarta, Indonesia.
His target, Hashim Baya, happens to be #1 on Interpol’s Red Notice list, so Mason isn’t the only one hunting him and has to make sure he finds him first. But Baya has the home field advantage in this part of the world. Besides the reference to the native saltwater crocodile, I was also able to draw upon other examples of local animal life, including this moment when Baya has set up an elaborate diversion so that he can slip into Singapore unnoticed:
On a quiet and dark section of Singapore’s north shore, across the river from Malaysia, a small fishing boat cut its motor and drifted toward a lonely dock.
One of the passengers looked across the river into the Malaysian jungle and remembered a time when he had been there as a boy. His father had taken him on a hunting trip, and when they were deep in the jungle, they had both seen a large bird flying through the trees high above them. The boy’s father had put a hand on his shoulder and stopped him abruptly, then had pulled him back into the cover of an areca palm frond.
“What is that bird?” the boy had asked him, in Indonesian.
“That is the Malaysian Honey Buzzard.”
“That is a funny name.”
“Listen carefully,” the father had said. “Whenever you see that bird, you must make sure to take cover. Never let that bird see you on the ground.”
“Why, will it attack us?”
“No, something much worse. Do you see that beehive, in that highest tree?”
The boy strained to look. He could barely see it, a dark mass two hundred feet above the ground.
“That’s the Giant Honey Bees’ hive,” the father said. “If they decide to attack you, they will sting you a thousand times. No man can survive that.”
That made the boy afraid. Even now he remembered the feeling.
“If the bird sees you,” the father said, “he will fly up and strike at the hive until they come out. Then he’ll lead them down to you, and the bees will believe that you are the enemy, not the bird. You will die on the ground as the bird flies back to the hive and enjoys his feast.”
Hashim Baya had remembered that lesson for the rest of his life – of the bird who was smart enough to create its own fatal diversion before raiding a beehive – and remembered that lesson now as he stepped ashore onto Singapore soil.
Where else could I have found a bird that cunningly sets you up to be stung to death by giant bees? But that’s the strange and utterly foreign world where Nick Mason finds himself in this book. And that’s just one reason why this is his toughest mission yet. In fact, for the first time ever, Nick Mason will fail. More than once.
But he’ll keep going, because finding the Crocodile is the only way he can save himself – along with the family he left ten thousand miles behind him.
Steve Hamilton is the two-time Edgar Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of the Alex McKnight series, the Nick Mason series, and the standalone novel The Lock Artist. Two of his novels have been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and he’s one of only three authors in history to win Edgar Awards for both Best First Novel and Best Novel. Other major awards include the Shamus, the Barry, the American Library Association Alex Award, and the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller.
