Dead Ground

Nora Harken finally has names.

After months of mapping a shadow network called Blackvine through financial forensics and a cooperating insider, Nora's DOJ task force has identified the three former intelligence officers behind the operation. One was CIA clandestine services. One was CIA counterintelligence. And one — a retired DIA colonel named Edward Sinclair — was the senior intelligence liaison on Nora's own task force twelve years ago, when four of her colleagues were killed in what was ruled an operational failure. Her failure.

The twelve-column evidence wall tells the story: eight years of insider-threat assessments weaponized into career destructions, disappearances, and deaths across nine industries. But the evidence wall can't answer the question that has defined Nora's life since Ashland. What happened to Marcus Webb — her team leader, the man everyone assumed was the traitor — and what does Sinclair's presence on that task force mean about the night four people died?

When a dormant financial account suddenly wires $42,000 to a surveillance firm in Portland, Oregon, Nora realizes two things: the target of that surveillance is almost certainly Webb, alive and hiding under an assumed name. And Blackvine isn't just protecting its secrets — it's eliminating the one person who can explain what really happened at Ashland.

Now Nora is in a race against the network that made her. If she can find Webb before Blackvine does, she'll have the witness who can bring down the entire operation. If she can't, she'll lose the truth she's spent twelve years earning — along with the man who's been carrying it.