On the maiden voyage of the MV Atlas, the world’s largest cruise ship, a ghost operative team attempts a silent extraction of a high-value defector carrying an impossible secret: an ancient, non-human artifact. Hidden amongst twenty-two thousand passengers and stalked by an elite foreign intelligence network, the team must execute a precise, high-stakes tradecraft operation in international waters. One wrong move could blow their cover and trigger a confrontation that could break the global order.
Our companion short story, “The Perfect Plan,” follows Novak running a flawless document handoff in Vienna — until the asset turns up somewhere the city’s own transit system says is physically impossible for him to be. It’s a tight, unsettling look at how meticulously Novak works, and a plan that holds everywhere except the one place it shouldn’t be able to break at all.
","author_name":"Keith Conrad / Darren Marlar"}