The Iron Code

Two hundred operatives. Ten nations. One verbal contract, sworn among six people in a mountain lodge: act only where every lawful authority has failed, decide nothing without near-unanimous consent among the Panel of Ten, and when the seventh year ends, cease to exist. No extension. No successor.For seven years it works. Traffickers vanish. Warlords fall to accidents no one can trace. Corrupt officials find their crimes exposed by hands they never see. A quiet rotation of ordinary lives, a Little League coach, a shop owner, an electrician, hides the machine in plain sight, while a global monitoring board keeps its own private ledger of what it costs the two hundred to keep the promise.Then a government analyst notices a pattern with no name, and the organization's founder watches the fight he always feared arrive from within, not the hunters closing in, but his own people beginning to ask whether justice this effective should ever agree to end.As the countdown reaches its final days, the Panel of Ten must decide whether seven years was a promise or only a plan, and whether walking away is its own kind of courage.THE IRON CODE is a novel about the price of quiet justice, and what it costs the people who carry it out.