The Meridian Cipher: A Geostrategic Thriller

Some secrets aren't buried for years. They're buried for centuries.Antwerp, 1582. A mapmaker finishes the most dangerous chart in the world - not gold, not trade routes, but what lies buried deep beneath the continent, drawn for descendants who won't be born for four hundred years. When the men who commissioned it come to kill him, he burns the map and hides its key inside a brass astrolabe.Geneva, present day. A former European Commissioner dies at an auction - poisoned in a crowded ballroom while bidding on that same astrolabe. The coroner calls it a heart attack. Robert Smart doesn't believe in coincidences that punctual.Smart is an intelligence analyst: German service, British name, a desk in Brussels that nobody quite remembers assigning him. His subject is Europe's rare earths - the metals behind every motor and turbine, the ones Europe doesn't control. The dead man left him a trail. It leads to eleven plots of worthless land, a Swiss foundation that has filed its paperwork without fail since 1887, and a map of what lies beneath the continent.Someone has been buying the future of Europe one quiet acre at a time. They think in centuries. They have never once been caught. And now, after four hundred years of waiting, they have decided to stop.From a Geneva saleroom to the covered arcades of Paris and a sealed chamber beneath Vienna's Imperial Crypt, Smart and a watchful German field officer race a clock that is suddenly, violently short - against an enemy that has had four lifetimes to prepare, and a conspiracy hidden not in shadow but in plain, lawful, immaculate daylight.Smart has days. They have had four hundred years. And the only way to beat them is to find the one thing they cannot survive.A geopolitical thriller in the tradition of John le Carré - patient, precise, and built on a secret old enough to outlast everyone hunting it. For readers of Daniel Silva, Charles Cumming, and Mick Herron.

Pages: 229, Paperback, Independently published