The Pace

A murdered scientist. A rigged number hidden in the world's most important cryptographic standard. And a measurement so small no one thought to check it.When metrologist Zeno Canna's stepfather - the man who spent his life defining exactly how the world measures itself - turns up dead, Zeno inherits more than grief. He inherits a question nobody else is asking: what if the flaw isn't in the code, but in the number everyone agreed to trust?Buried inside a new global post-quantum encryption standard is a single value - a nonce, 21600 - that shouldn't be there. Pulling that thread drags Zeno from the sealed vaults of international standards bodies to the boardrooms of the institutions that quietly decide what "official" even means, where he collides with Aldrich Vane: a man with every incentive to keep the number exactly where it is, and an argument for why it should stay there that's uncomfortably hard to refute.With cryptographer Sibilla Roux and detective Mira Novak the only people willing to follow the evidence past where it's convenient to stop, Zeno races to prove that the world's newest, most trusted standard was built on a lie small enough to hide in plain sight - before the people who built it in decide the truth is a problem that needs solving too.The Pace is Book I of The Cubit and the Quark, a series about the units we use to measure the world - and who gets to decide what they mean. Weaving Tesla's forgotten war with J.P. Morgan into a present-day thriller about trust, standards, and who really controls them, this is a story for readers of Dan Brown and Michael Crichton who want their conspiracies built on something real.