As they flee for their lives in a lethal environment, their only hope for survival is to find out who is behind this masterful ploy. Especially when the protagonist starts tapping Morse code out on the iceberg to attract the patrolling nuclear submarine. I liked a lot the way of how Dan Brown proposed his idea of the finding of alien life, since it can be easily the way as it will happen in real life. President Zachary Herney, the incumbent in a hotly contested presidential race, is a strong supporter of a publicly funded NASA, open to the scientific community at large.

Rachel's boss, NRO director William Pickering, has them airlifted from the sub to a chopper which escorts them away from the meteorite discovery site. But before Rachel can contact the President, she and Michael are attacked by a deadly task force…a private team of assassins controlled by a mysterious powerbroker who will stop at nothing to hide the truth. Michael Tolland: An oceanographer and television celebrity-scientist, Tolland possesses excellent educational and social skills and does not exhibit unchecked anger, as other characters do.

In the end, there’s a happy ending for the younger Sexton, who begins a romantic relationship with Tolland, but not for the older Sexton, whose plotting to kill NASA is revealed to the public, contributing to Herney winning re-election. Brown is currently at work on a new book as well as the Columbia Pictures film version of his most recent novel. The Delta Force team believes them to be dead, leaving the scientists a chance to tell the President's advisor and Rachel's boss at the NRO about their discovery, and the subsequent attack. Aboard Tolland's ship off the New Jersey coast, where the Delta Force arrives via helicopter to kill them, Rachel sends a fax message to her father asking for help.

Second, my daughter is not employed by the President; she is employed by the intelligence community. Gabrielle later threatens to expose her one-time illegitimate affair to dissuade Sexton from sacrificing her daughter for his political ambitions. Normally the harsh electronic beeping was an unwelcome interruption, but at the moment, it sounded almost melodious. Occasionally the remarkable scientific knowledge of Dan Brown gets in the way with ultra technical expositions which interrupt the proceedings. A senator's daughter is unhappy with her father; he's running for president and trying to muzzle her.

Chris Harper: NASA section manager; he appears in four dedicated chapters and explains how NASA did not find the meteorite as claimed. Ashe discovers that Tench's claims are true, but also finds out that NASA lied about the origin of the meteorite.

Sexton attempts to reveal Rachel's fax in a press conference in hopes of implicating NASA and the president in the meteorite hoax, but Rachel and Gabrielle swap Rachel's fax with the photo evidence of Sexton's affair with Gabrielle, humiliating him and ruining his chances of winning the election. Multiply that by 5 (some instance of someone using, gasp, cream, or sugar) and 2 minutes have been sucked from your life. In the world of page-turning thrillers, Dan Brown holds a special place in the hearts of many of us.

There is a lot of potential for the characters in this book for further novels, and potentially discovering other secrets different Governments or agencies have hidden away from the public.

Gisters reduce complex reports into single-page briefs, and in this case the president needs that confirmation before he broadcasts to the nation, probably ensuring his re-election. Join now to access our Study Guides library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on more than 5,000 literary works from novels to nonfiction to poetry. A book with all this information and many events and depth and of course beautiful narrative makes you enjoy very novel and insist that you know the events and of course accept between the topics and events are very beautiful and do not feel anything boring or ordinary. Rachel Sexton handles data communications for national intelligence, her father is running for President against the corporation she helps run.When a new NASA satellite detects evidence of an astonishingly rare object buried deep in the Arctic ice, the floundering space agency proclaims a much needed victory. Norah Mangor: A prickly glaciologist, Norah has a tough, tomboyish personality; she is suffocated with ice and snow early in the book by Pickering's death squad and was thrown into the Arctic Ocean along with her sled. It is 110 feet long, 60 feet wide, smoothly contoured with a crystalline patina of thermal tiles much like the space shuttle.