Deep Sleep (Vol. 1): Codename: White Knight

Content

A wave of mysterious violent crimes has the world on tenterhooks. The targets: politicians, top managers, tech gurus. At first glance, nothing seems to connect the events, except that all of them were committed by mysterious teenage assassins: deadly killing machines, trained in a discontinued top secret CIA black ops program: Operation DEEP SLEEP took children and young teenagers off the streets to train them as “superhuman” assassins. Conditioned to be unaware of their old lives and the skills they have learnt, they lead carefree teenage lives as adopted children with false identities – until a trigger consisting of a code word and a children’s song wakes these “sleepers” up and summons them to their mission destinations.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that a ruthless organisation has seized the long-defunct program and is pursuing its own agenda under the code name GOOD MOTHER: the almost total AI control over the world’s data streams.
The only one who could stop them is none other than a former DEEP SLEEPER: seventeen-year-old Ian Brown. Ian is “woken” by a mysterious stranger called Whisperer to prevent a planned assassination and learn more about the masterminds behind it. While he manages to neutralise the three adolescent assassins, he gets injured and loses consciousness. When he wakes up, he wanders aimlessly until – ragged and hungry – he is finally scooped up by “Big Fly”, a single man in his late forties with a big heart who seems to have dropped out of the modern world and runs an old-fashioned children’s carousel that barely allows him to make ends meet. Since Ian can’t even remember his own name, Big Fly simply calls him John.
From then on, “John” travels the country from funfair to funfair with Big Fly. Consequently, for a while neither the Whisperer nor the GOOD MOTHER masterminds know where to find him. The only connection to Ian’s/John’s true identity is a key around his neck. We later learn that the key was given to him by the Whisperer (who evolves into Ian/John’s mysterious mentor over the course of the book) and fits a rented storage room: along with equipment, fake passports, prepaid mobiles, cash etc., this is where Ian/John discovers information about his past and gains deeper insights into DEEP SLEEP and GOOD MOTHER. Ian is devastated – but there is no time to think. In the wake of the dramatic events of volume one, he has suddenly attracted the attention of the GOOD MOTHER masterminds again who had been looking for him the entire time.
A deadly cat and mouse game around the world begins while Ian he tries to stay under the radar and stop those who have done this to him and the other teenagers once and for all.