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The 72-Hour Deception
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 28 2025
Pages: 370
Weight: 1.09
Height: 0.77 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A stolen warhead. A compromised agency. Seventy two hours to stop a manufactured war.
When a scrambled signal slams into Langley's feeds and shuts down a quiet night in the CIA's cyber wing, veteran analyst Vivian Cross is the one who cracks it. The message is short and surgical.
Warhead. Black Pool. Three Days.
Within hours, CIA Headquarters erupts in a devastating attack that kills colleagues, erases evidence, and turns Cross into the perfect scapegoat. Her badge is revoked. Her accounts are frozen. Every camera, checkpoint, and watchlist in the country is suddenly looking for her face.
The only proof of her innocence is the one thing she cannot show anyone without triggering a global crisis.
Forced off the grid, Vivian is left with a handful of impossible allies. A dead arms dealer whose encrypted archive hints at a sale gone wrong. A rogue hacker with a personal grudge against Langley. A name that should not exist in any official file.
Pax Sanguis. The peace of blood.
The group moves inside governments and corporations like a parasite. Their objective is simple. Orchestrate one surgical nuclear strike, blame the wrong actor, then ride the chaos as the world staggers into a new balance of power.
To stop them, Vivian has to work in the gaps of a collapsing system. Elite kill teams are tracking her across continents. Deepfake footage paints her as a traitor before she can speak. Intelligence networks she helped build are now quietly feeding her location to the highest bidder.
From secure rooms in Washington D.C. to back alleys in Istanbul, from darknet markets to the floors of an international summit, Vivian races to piece together three critical questions.
Who really controls Pax Sanguis
Where the missing warhead is headed
Why the first move in this game required destroying her life
Every answer costs her another layer of safety. Every new ally may already be bought. The countdown does not care.
What you get
High speed espionage that respects tradecraft, digital and human
Cyber warfare that feels built from real tools, not magic hacking
A competent lead who uses brains, pattern recognition, and discipline more than luck
Set pieces that hit, from a compromised safe house in D.C. to a street level chase through Istanbul while the world's leaders are locked in a room above
Read if you like
Jason Bourne style manhunt pressure with modern surveillance
Homeland and I Am Pilgrim, with an emphasis on cyber operations and betrayal inside the system
Geopolitical thrillers where the smallest data point can start or stop a war
The 72-Hour Deception is espionage at its most electrified and most personal. The clock has already started. The blast radius will not care who was right.
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