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history and graduated having learned one cardinal truth: It ’ s always the innocent and the vulnerable who are sacrificed and trampled on for history to move forward. He joined the Bureau to change that. To stand up for the victims of crime, hostages specifically, who would otherwise be slain to settle larger scores.
    After completing the new agent ’ s training at the academy, he paid his dues for five years as a lowly field agent in Baltimore. But he always saw his freshman gig as a stepping-stone to his real ambitions. A year after he had joined the service, the Bureau merged its crisis management, rapid deployment, hostage negotiation, and profiling units under a ubiquitous entity called the Critical Incident Response Group. When the time was right, Blackwell raised his hand as high as the heavens to join the group. He had made a name for himself on the ground, and the CIRG was looking to attract the Bureau ’ s best.
    After two years at the bottom of the food chain, he applied for the grueling four-and-a-half month selection and training to qualify as an operator in the CIRG ’ s now-legendary Hostage Rescue Team. Few men survive this course, even fewer who don ’ t have some form of military or law enforcement background. It ’ s a brutal elimination process, at the end of which the Hostage Rescue Team gains an elite counter-terrorism force of physically superior agents who can run, swim, scuba dive, fast-rope and fly under any conditions.
    But Blackwell made it in, and for half a decade was on the frontline of penetrating dangerous armed situations to pluck out hostages, with the Hostage Rescue Team ’ s gold squad. During those years he witnessed the darkest shades of the human soul. But it only served to strengthen his resolve, and keep his hands firmly on the deck and his eyes on target.
    Five years later, that perpetually expanding urge within him to do more to affect the outcome of violent hostage situations was no longer timid or containable. Pointing a lethal Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine gun at dreadful human beings to stand them down had become a stagnant, inconsequential part of the case spectrum. What he really wanted to do was dive in to the minds of criminals and terrorists and manipulate them out of whatever horrendous things they were intent on doing, well before the only option was to put a bullet in their heads and risk the lives of innocent bystanders. Hostage negotiation was his ultimate calling, he concluded with unshakable certainty.
    He performed the requisite initial training before he came under the wings of none other than Jerry Nester, the God of critical incidents at the Bureau who saw in Blackwell a hungry heir to the throne. By the time Nester had laid down his headset and retired, Blackwell was ready to take his own show on the road. And his instincts were right all along—he was a natural hostage negotiator. In the few short years after Nester ’ s reign, Blackwell etched his name in gold at the Hoover building as the FBI ’ s most revered critical incident negotiator, and a worthy successor to Nester.
    Many years had elapsed since he ’ d played this game of trying to decipher the mind of a hostage-taker based on their actions. The negotiations hadn ’ t even started, but Blackwell already felt at a disadvantage. He had a lot of catching up to do and would spend the remaining part of the flight siphoning as much information as he could from his former colleague. Blackwell moved his head away from the Seahawk window and focused on Carter ’ s eyes.
    “Help me out here, Carter. Exertify is a security company, right?”
    Carter nodded.
    “So why didn ’ t they do a background check on this prince character before they decided to do business with him or let him in their office?”
    “They did, Alex, and he checked out.”
    “What do you mean he checked out?”
    Carter took a deep breath. “There is a real Prince Omar Al Seraj.”
    “So he stole his identity?”
    “That