“A top five book of the year!” ―Providence Journal
“Linda Stasi crafts a tale combining Islam, Christianity, and National Security. If you like controversy with your suspense, The Sixth Station is for you.” ―Bill O'Reilly, anchor, Fox News Channel
“Mayhem, madness, passion, and pride battle in this wild escapade that stirs straight to the soul. This one has the Vatican, ancient secrets, mysterious relics, and the Knights Templar-- all the right elements to engage both the mind and the imagination. Careful, though, you'll be gripping the pages so tight your knuckles will turn white.” ―Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Templar Legacy
“The Sixth Station, Linda Stasi's debut novel, is a hell of a religious thriller. The Sixth Station has it all--great writing, exciting plot, and intriguing characters--and the ending is a shocker.” ―Nelson DeMille, New York Times bestselling author of Night Fall and The Gate House
“The Sixth Station is exactly the kind of blockbuster thriller you would expect from Linda Stasi--smart, intriguing, irreverent, impeccably researched, and brilliantly provocative. If you liked The Da Vinci Code, you'll devour this book.” ―Linda Fairstein, New York Times bestselling author of Night Watch and former Manhattan Sex Crimes Prosecutor
“Stasi does an amazing job of mixing science with religious paranoia in this compelling thriller...Dan Brown and Steve Berry fans have another controversial novel in which to lose themselves.” ―Booklist
“It’s a riveting, fast-paced tale that had my heart pounding on more than one occasion. That said, I was more interested in Ms. Stasi’s real-world discoveries and how they affected her outlook on life.” ―Washington Times
“If you like Dan Brown, I think this book will be right up your alley . . . this is a fast paced thriller that will have you turning the pages quickly.” ―The Kari AnnAlysis
“The thrill of the mystery will suck readers in despite the unusual topic. The Sixth Station undeniably shows Statsi's ability to completely captivate her readers!” ―Lovey Dovey Books
“The best debut thriller of the year hands-down takes us into the heart of a mammoth global conspiracy through the eyes of intrepid reporter Alexandra Russo. Stasi, a reporter herself, has crafted an expertly researched and wondrously conceived tale that delivers at every level, propelling her right out of the box to a Ludlum-esque level and making her heir to the throne once occupied by the great Helen MacInnes.” ―Providence Sunday Journal, Top 5 Books of the Year List
About the Author
LINDA STASI, the popular and well-read columnist for the New York Daily News, and previously for the New York Post, is also an on-camera TV co-host with Mark Simone on NY 1 -Spectrum “What a Week!”Brash, funny and opinionated, the acerbic Stasi’s first novel, The Sixth Station, published in January of 2013 by Forge Books, hit Amazon’s top 25 and was hailed as, “A helluva religious thriller,” by Nelson DeMille, while Steve Berry said, “You’ll be grabbing the pages so tight your knuckles will turn white!” Booklist said of the book, “Dan Brown and Steve Berry fans have another controversial novel in which to lose themselves.” For The Sixth Station, Stasi was selected as a finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award.Stasi’s anxiously awaited sequel, Book of Judas, has received acclaim from mega bestselling authors such as Sherrilyn Kenyon, who calls it, “An innovative masterpiece!” Stasi has appeared on TV talk shows and news channels such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, The O’Reilly Factor, Hardball, Good Day New York, and The View, as well as CNN, Fox News, MSNBC news shows, and many others.She is a regular guest on iHeartRadio’s nationally broadcast Mark Simone Show, Boston’s “Matty In The Morning,” and countless others around the country.Stasi has also authored the non-fiction books – Looking Good Is the Best Revenge, A Field Guide to Impossible Men, Simply Beautiful, Boomer Babes, and Scotto Sunday Suppers.Not afraid to say what’s on her mind in her popular Wednesdays and full-page Sunday columns in the New York Daily News, her readership has reached more than 600,000 in a single day.She was named “One of the Fifty Most Powerful Women in NYC” and has won numerous awards including Best Columnist by the Newswomen’s Club of NY, Best Humor Columnist, and Woman of the Year by the Boys Town of Italy for her charitable work such as driving a tractor-trailer in an 18-truck convoy from NYC to the gulf states with relief supplies for Hurricane Katrina victims.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
New York City, N.Y., USA
Thirty-three Years Later
It wasn’t my beat, it wasn’t my assignment, and it wasn’t my intention to alter reality that morning when my cell phone rang at 7:15 after a night highlighted by too many martinis with Donald, the ex.
Oh, God. Why didn’t we stay away from each other? Again.
We had no future and the past was a decade-old fantasy.
Baghdad, October 5, 2005
Kick-ass war correspondent and bad-boy photojournalist married by army chaplain amidst horrors of war in the lounge of the Palestine Hotel. Many drunken colleagues in attendance.
Or something like that.
Two days after the terribly romantic nuptials and drunken party that followed, the retreating Iraqis gave Donald and me an unforgettable wedding present: A bomb hidden inside a cement-mixer truck was detonated outside the hotel, taking out the lobby. Gucci bags and Fendi fur coats from the high-end lobby shops were blown out of the stores and lay among broken glass and giant hunks of falling plaster.
When the blast hit (we were in bed, of course), Donald jumped up, threw on jeans, and grabbed his cameras. He wasn’t worried about our (my) safety; he was worried about missing the action, i.e., the photos.
Instead of thinking he was a big horse’s ass, I jumped into a tracksuit and we both took the partially collapsed stairs four steps at a time. I too was probably more terrified of missing the action (i.e., the story) than I was about the danger. I should have realized it was a defining moment.
We weren’t allowed back into our hotel to collect our things, so we bunked down with three other journos in the apartment of a friend of a friend.
Donald left early one morning—he was imbedding with the Second Battalion of the Fourth Infantry Regiment. He gave me a perfunctory kiss, but I grabbed him tight and pulled him close. “Be careful,” I said.
He put his big hands around my face and kissed me as though we were alone. “I’m too mean to get hurt,” he said.
About two hours later Donald was riding shotgun in a jeep when another roadside bomb exploded, throwing him thirty feet, breaking his femur and a few ribs.
When I finally got to him in the makeshift army hospital, I kissed his head and said, “Time to get outta Dodge, baby,” trying for sardonic and missing completely.
I made arrangements for us to get back to NYC, where I nursed his cranky self back to health and got my first and only Pulitzer nomination from the New York Post, who’d employed me at the time.
Our crazy wartime marriage was hot and dangerous. We couldn’t get enough of each other—and even though he was a giant pain in the ass when he was busted up, the broken-femur sex was sensational. Who knew?
I—we—were very happy, happy enough, in fact, for me to start thinking about maybe having a baby. Yikes.
Donald said he didn’t think a baby was a great idea, because a family would keep me tied at home when he knew I’d be desperate to get to the next war/murder/scandal/whatever. I pouted for three months straight.
Finally, one night when he was well enough to hit the road again—he was off to cover the wildfires in Texas—he turned to me with a dopey grin and said, “Okay, whatever you want.”
“You’re acting like I want to get a dog,” I said.
“Not a bad idea—maybe test-drive the mother thing with a nice German shepherd for a few years first?” he teased, and we fell onto the bed laughing.
Somehow, though, it—a pregnancy—never happened. Great sex doesn’t always lead to greater things.
Two years later we ended as abruptly as we had started, although not as dramatically.
It was a fast and clean break to a messy marriage, which involved much sex and even more fighting. Kiss-and-make-up is only fun in the movies.
One Monday morning Donald and I were off to cover different assignments—he back to Iraq, me to cover the presidential campaigns.
As I got out of the cab at JFK, he kissed me hard and simply said, “Time to get outta Dodge, baby.” I knew he wasn’t talking about leaving the country. He was talking about leaving the marriage.
And that was that.
I knew he was right. He liked gambling on sports, staying up all night, and hanging out in strip clubs in disease-riddled cities with names that weren’t composed of letters in the English alphabet. He was a horrible dancer who made duck lips when he was really feeling it.
I like sports that I play myself, getting into bed early with a good book or, better yet, a bad boy, and going dancing with my gay men friends who never make duck lips no matter how much they’re feeling the music.
Donald and I had nothing in common other than that we were both agnostics, preferred fast stick shifts to fancy SUVs, and would risk everything for a story.
He was resentful that I’d been nominated for a Pulitzer for covering the same war at the same time, while his newsweekly, U.S. News, hadn’t nominated him. And he’d taken one for the Gipper, while I’d come home in one piece.
Me? I was jealous that I never got sent back to a war zone again. Weird? Sure.
But I took his leaving me like a bullet to my heart anyway. I cried for a month straight, drank too much with my friend Dona and my hairdresser pals, hardened my heart, and threw myself into my work.
A decade after we’d said “I do,” however, we still couldn’t say “I won’t.”
And so I found myself—all those years later—faced with a ringing phone. Since it is for reporters a genetic impossibility to ignore a ringing phone, I reached for it.
I sincerely wished he wouldn’t call the morning after the night before. (Big lie.) Better yet, I wished we wouldn’t ever have a night before again. (Truth.)
Be careful what you wish for.
I picked it up without bothering to look at the caller ID. “Go away, Donald,” I said.
“Alessandra?” I heard a copy kid at the other end say. Oops.
“It’s the City Desk. Can you hold for Dickie Smalls?” As if holding for Dickie Smalls were an option. I knew it would take about fourteen seconds for the whole newsroom to know I’d slept with Donald. Damn!
Mildly surprised, I held on, of course, knowing that it was usually not good when a call came through from Dickie early in the morning: It always meant something unexpected—an assignment that would send me to the Bronx or Queens or, worse, complaints about a story I’d filed the night before.
Bleary and hung over, I nonetheless held on for Managing Editor Dickie Smalls, a man who devoted his life to overcoming his name. His job was second only to that of editor in chief—the only one to whom Smalls ever spoke with any respect.
“Russo? Dickie,” Dickie yelled into my headache. Dickie, who usually didn’t have his first drink until at least 11:00 A.M, was probably still sober, I realized.
“You got the TV on? Put on New York One,” he continued yelling without expecting an answer.
I obliged by reaching for the remote on the nightstand, and flicked to NY1. They were showing a helicopter view of my neighborhood, the United Nations area of Manhattan, while the voice of Simon Franks, one of their top reporters, clearly trying to keep his voice controlled, was announcing, “I’m looking down on this massive sea of humanity, the likes of which I certainly have never seen! The crowd, the mob—whatever you can call such a thing—stretches along the Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza park over onto Forty-seventh Street and First Avenue, up and down First Avenue from Forty-second Street to Fifty-seventh Street, and the cross streets from Forty-fourth through Forty-seventh as far west as Madison Avenue!
“Seriously folks, this city has never experienced a sight like this before!”
And he was right about that. Today was the start of the terror trial—tribunal, actually—of terrorist Demiel ben Yusef.
While a tribunal like this one would normally have been held at The Hague, the World Court building had sustained huge damage in a terrorist bombing several months earlier and was still uninhabitable. The perpetrators had never been caught. So, no, while most New Yorkers were not happy to have this mess of a security risk in our town, we reporters were thrilled.
You could hear it in Franks’s voice:
“And I venture to say,” he continued, not missing a beat, “that every person down there is desperate to catch even the tiniest glimpse of Demiel ben Yusef, who goes on trial today—perhaps as soon as a couple of hours from now!”
I am a jaded reporter. I have reported on everything from 9/11 to war to Hurricanes Katrina and Anthony, the earthquake in Haiti, and many of the increasingly now-commonplace natural disasters of incalculable suffering around the planet.
This was different. Something, indeed something I didn’t really understand—maybe it was blind faith or deep hatred—had driven hundreds of thousands of folks out of their homes, jobs, and schools. They’d wheeled, walked, and traveled from their apartments, condos, houses, hospitals, nursing homes, churches, synagogues, mosques, banks, and government offices to protest, to ogle, to see in person the most vicious criminal of our time.
Even I was shocked by the size of the crowds.
“You watching? You understand what’s going on here?” Dickie said.
“Of course I do,” I said, trying not to let my excitement show.
My heart started pounding. What did Dickie really want?
Please let this be the break I need. I swear this time I’ll do it their way. Please tell me something good. Tell me I’m gonna cover …
All Dickie would give me, though, was, ...
