Thirty years ago, in a facility buried beneath a vast Wyoming emptiness, an experiment gone awry accidentally opened a door.

It is the world's best-kept secret—and its most terrifying.

Trying to regain his life in the Alaskan wilds, ex-con/ex-cop Travis Chase stumbles upon an impossible scene: a crashed 747 passenger jet filled with the murdered dead, including the wife of the President of the United States. Though a nightmare of monumental proportions, it pales before the terror to come, as Chase is dragged into a battle for the future that revolves around an amazing artifact.

Allied with a beautiful covert operative whose life he saved, Chase must now play the role he's been destined for—a pawn of incomprehensible forces or humankind's final hope—as the race toward Apocalypse begins in earnest.

Because something is loose in the world.

And doomsday is not only possible . . . it is inevitable.

Patrick Lee was born and raised in west Michigan. He spent four and a half years at a two-year college, and wishes he was kidding about that. In his twenties, he sold two screenplays to film studios in Los Angeles, but neither was produced. Who'd have guessed that a modern retelling of Lysistrata, set in a maximum-security prison, would fail to get a greenlight?

In his early thirties, Patrick made the jump to writing novels, managed to get the coolest agent in the business (Janet Reid at FinePrint), and sold two books to HarperCollins. The first of them, The Breach, debuts in January of 2010.