Tripwire

She followed a dead woman's trail through Berlin. The trail led to the people she loved.

When a former NSA analyst is killed in Berlin, she leaves behind a breadcrumb trail coded in the language of a classified program only one person can read. That person is Tom Ochoa, a freelance cybersecurity consultant in Lisbon, former signals intelligence analyst, and the man Katherine Karis loves. The trail leads to evidence of a predictive intelligence platform built on stolen American technology and sold to governments to identify which citizens will become problems before they become them. The evidence is worth killing for. Someone already has.

Karis knows operations. She's run them in Prague and Istanbul, each time exposing institutional failures that powerful people wanted buried. But Berlin is different. In Berlin, the threat isn't external. It's intimate. The people closest to her have been keeping secrets. Tom locked a drawer for a year. Her former handler arranged the conditions of her life with a chess player's patience. And her father's name appears on a document that connects the family she trusts to the system she's fighting.

To authenticate the evidence and transmit it before a CIA counterintelligence team can stop her, Karis must protect the man she loves in a city she doesn't know, fight through tunnels and ruins with an arm that is slowly failing, and answer a question that the work keeps asking and that the work will never resolve: when does the person who counts the cost become the person who stops counting?

From the creator of the acclaimed Karis series, Tripwire is a spy thriller about the distance between the people who love you and the secrets they keep, and the discovery that sometimes that distance is zero.

The third novel in the Karis series, following Cutout and Deadfall. Can be read as a standalone.