Mountain Moguls: Mark T. Sullivan’s “Triple Cross”

By Guest Writer, 6-05-09

Triple Cross
by Mark T. Sullivan
St. Martin’s Press., 390 pages, $24.95

Montana-based writer Mark T. Sullivan concocts a chilling recipe for disaster in his new thriller, Triple Cross.  The ingredients of this too-plausible plot will be familiar: action sports, terrorism, and the Internet.  But these elements come together in a way that will leave readers hoping Sullivan’s imagined scenario never comes true. 

Triple Cross opens on a snowy New Year’s Eve at the Jefferson Club, a remote mountain resort for the ultra rich.  Around 150 guests are gathered in the club’s colossal lodge to greet the New Year.  Some of the world’s most powerful people are hobnobbing in tuxedos and holiday gowns when a greed-busting terrorist group calling themselves the Third Position Army crashes the party. 

Hooded and covered in snow-colored camouflage, the Third Position Army quickly takes hostage the seven wealthiest men in the world and releases the others.  The Jefferson Club’s head of security, Mickey Hennessey, escapes from the initial attack with a gunshot wound to the arm, but his children—three teenagers—remain hiding inside the lodge.  A special FBI team quickly gathers to plan a rescue effort, and Hennessey joins them, determined to save his kids—or die trying. 

Meanwhile, the Third Position Army turns the Jefferson Club lodge into a makeshift courtroom, where each of the hostages is “tried” live on the Internet for his crimes against humanity.  Taking an extreme anti-globalist stance, the army’s leader General Anarchy presides in an eerie makeup disguise.  Media hype attracts online viewers, and those who watch the trial are invited to submit their votes to determine the fate of the defendants, à la reality TV. 

These impromptu trials undercover offenses such as a politician’s embezzlement schemes, an entrepreneur’s environmental disregard, and a businessman’s sexual transgressions, among others.  But when the punishments turn from public humiliation to grotesque executions meant to match their crimes, Hennessey’s teenagers start to fight back and endanger their lives in the process.

Readers will find themselves immersed in the unraveling of this tale, which begins with an explosive opener and moves along at a steady clip.  Sullivan’s suspense-builders rarely feel contrived, though some of the plot’s elements may be predicted.  Cheyenne O’Neil—the beautiful and intelligent FBI agent—is an obvious match for Hennessey, a fit, divorced, and distraught father of three.  However, Sullivan does a great job masking the mystery surrounding the Third Position Army and its members.  It’s not until the last few pages that their motives and identities all come together, making the plot’s final twist a satisfying one. 

Triple Cross will delight outdoor enthusiasts with nicely wrought descriptions of its jaw-dropping setting and its characters’ adventurous forays into the Jefferson Club’s sublime surroundings.  Security guru Hennessy is an expert telemark skier.  He floats through the Jefferson Club’s private powder stashes while guests flail behind him. And his kids rip through the terrain park on their snowboards like they’re next generation X Games medalists.  “Four hundred and fifty inches of light powder” fall within the club boundaries each year, and it often remains “deep and untracked for days.” These details will surely capture the imagination of Sullivan’s mountain-loving readership. 

Perhaps Sullivan’s knowledge of his own surroundings is what enables him to bring the Triple Cross landscape truly alive.  Sullivan lives with his family near Bozeman, Montana, just a stone’s throw away from the sugar-dusted peaks and snow-covered slopes he describes.  It takes the survivor of a wicked winter storm to explain how “gale winds gusted and turned the snowflakes to needles” as attackers approach the Jefferson Club. 

Triple Cross is not the first of Sullivan’s novels that takes place in a mountain setting.  Sullivan’s experience living among extreme skiers in Utah and Wyoming provided the material for his first novel, The Fall Line (1994).  Since then, Sullivan has written a total of seven mystery and suspense novels, including his bestselling The Serpent’s Kiss (2003), which did much to establish his global fan base. 

Those who know of the real-life controversy surrounding the Yellowstone Club—an exclusive ski and golf community in southwestern Montana –will have a hard time not making the obvious connections to Sullivan’s fictional Jefferson Club, even though Sullivan would like for us think otherwise.  From its beginnings, the Yellowstone Club has drawn harsh criticism from conversationalists and from others opposed to its founder’s methods of acquiring and developing this huge swath of wilderness. 

But in his acknowledgements, Sullivan claims that the Jefferson Club “bears no resemblance to TYC, nor do its members,” shying away from mentioning the Yellowstone Club except by its initials.  Even so, the parallel—intended or not—exists, and the mere idea that the Jefferson Club might be modeled after a place like “TYC” presents a compelling what-if. 

With its rumbling pace, Triple Cross is the kind of book you might find yourself sneaking back to once you’ve put it down.  The action becomes addictive.  And Sullivan’s knack for sustaining a steady and developing plot creates the sense that you might just miss something if you walk away. 

Traci J. Macnamara is a freelance writer whose writing has appeared in many magazines, journals and books, including Isotope and Backpacker.  She lives in Vail.