Clearance

It begins with a dead engineer in a darkened building, and a system that was sworn never to fail.

Then it spreads. Power. Water. The networks that move money and trains and hold a country upright – each one reached into and switched off, then on again, like a hand quietly testing a lock. The deaths are dressed as accidents. For a while.

David Carver has met this enemy before. The private intelligence cooperative he twice helped to break is leaderless, cornered and afraid – and it has begun to wake a century of sabotage buried inside the things Britain runs on. But the man who now holds the keys has changed the rules. He no longer hides the bodies. A witness who begins to talk is found shot by a roadside. The threat reaches David's own front door. And the demonstration is only a sliver of what he is holding hostage.

Pulled back into a war he thought he had survived, David is finally handed the access and the standing he was always denied – and learns, too late, that the people who brought him in are not the ones he can trust. With a deadline running down and an enemy who cannot be caught, bought or frightened, he has one move left: find the traitor at his back before the next system goes dark, and the next, and the one his family is standing closest to.