The Eternal Stalemate

The guns of August 1914 never fell silent.

When a German diplomat makes a fatal choice on an icy Berlin street, the United States stays out of the Great War and history fractures. More than a century later, the Eternal Stalemate grinds on. Europe is locked in a war no one can win, drone swarms patrol no-man's-land where soldiers once died by the millions, and America and Japan, rival superpowers locked in their own Pacific Cold War, hold the fragile balance between order and catastrophe.

Then a Swiss cryptanalyst pulls a misfiled intercept from a Bern archive. The message is a year old. The radioactive material it describes is missing. And the man behind it has been planning something catastrophic for a very long time.

Now a rogue intelligence operative, an OSC field agent, a Japanese shadow warrior, and an arms dynasty heir have hours to stop a dirty bomb from detonating beneath a live peace summit, without alerting the man holding the trigger that they are coming.

If they fail, the stalemate ends. Not in peace. In war.