The Patriot Threat

Steve Berry’s thriller The Patriot Threat (2015) is the tenth Cotton Malone novel in the series. Combining actual history with broad conspiracy theory, the story pivots off the idea that the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which specifically makes collecting income tax legal, might not have been properly adopted.

The prologue is set in 1936. Former Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon is meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The two men despise each other, sitting on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Mellon is offering to fund the building and operation of the National Gallery of Art, a gift Roosevelt cannot refuse. Mellon stipulates that the Gallery must be independently run, giving Roosevelt a note that Roosevelt says is gibberish. Mellon shows Roosevelt a marked-up dollar bill revealing a secret code that deciphers to the word “Mason,” which Mellon insists will be the end of Roosevelt’s kind, whom Mellon regards as a tyrant. As he leaves, he tells Roosevelt that he will be waiting.

The action switches to the present day. In Venice, Italy, Cotton Malone, on a mission to recover millions of dollars, is engaged in a gunfight in an office. Retired from his intelligence work with the Magellan Billet, an elite group within the CIA, Malone has taken on a temporary job because he is bored with his retirement in Copenhagen. When the gunmen try to escape in a helicopter, Malone leaps onto the skids, forcing the helicopter down by shooting the rotors. He escapes shooting again, causing the helicopter to explode, taking with it $20 million.



Also in Venice is Kim Jong Jin, the recently disgraced and disinherited heir of North Korea, and his daughter Hana, who grew up being tortured in a gulag. Kim is torturing and drugging a Treasury official who has knowledge of documents related to the Sixteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that reveal that it was illegally adopted, meaning that all taxes collected since the inception of the income tax are illegal. Kim wants these documents so he can cripple the United States and also embarrass his father in revenge for his own humiliation. The official tells Kim that infamous tax protester Anan Wayne Howell is in possession of the documents. Kim also discovers that the descendants of Haym Salomon, a financier who personally loaned money to the U.S. during the Revolution and was never repaid, dying in poverty, are owed billions. Together, these facts would destroy the U.S.

After the debacle with the helicopter, Stephanie Nelle, chief of the Magellan Billet, asks Malone to follow the cruise and regain those documents while she and her team investigate the mystery behind them. There is a coded message from Mellon using a substitution cipher that no one has been able to break. They come into possession of the clues that Andrew Mellon had left for President Roosevelt, which leads them to the famous portrait The Washington Family that hangs in the National Gallery. Stephanie discovers that Mellon had been in possession of the portrait and had it moved into the permanent collection at the Gallery when the building was complete. Noting the oddness of the portrait, she discovers a hidden compartment in the painting that produces a key.

Malone teams up with Luke Daniels, a cousin to the President, and encounters treasury investigator Isabella Schaefer who has been assigned to the case; the two begin working together as well. They track Howell to a cruise and discover that Kim will be on board as well. Kim comes into possession of the documents and plans to use them to spark a financial crisis between the U.S. and China by revealing the tax code is illegal and that the U.S. owes the Salomon family $330 billion.



As a gunfight rages on the cruise ship between the Koreans and Malone’s side, Kim is recalled to Korea when a coup deposes his half-brother and he has a chance to take over the country. His daughter, Hana, burns the documents, as revealing them is no longer in their interest. Malone breaks Mellon’s code, his message to President Roosevelt finally deciphered; it reveals that Mellon never actually had the proof that he claimed, he simply hated Roosevelt and what he represented so much, he wished to cause as much trouble as possible, even from beyond the grave.

The book ends with a lengthy note from the author explaining what is historical fact and what is speculation or outright fiction. Much of the story is taken from true events—the Sixteenth Amendment’s ratification was controversial, and the Salomon family does, indeed, claim to be owed billions of dollars stemming from Haym’s work during the revolution.