The Cyclone Inheritance

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He can become anyone. That is the problem.

A boy raised where a man's word is the whole of him grows up to become a professional liar.

Flagged at twelve as something rare, then buried by parents who wanted him ordinary, Rhys Morgan is claimed years later by a service with no name. It takes his one gift - an ear that hears the shape of a language before he understands a single word of it - and builds other men out of him.

Hamburg. Beirut. Istanbul. Across the long decade of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Rhys learns the analog trade the hard way, in person and without a net: how to age a false name until it breathes, how to walk into a paranoid network and come out trusted, how to turn that trust into a blade.

He is good at it. He is too good at it. Every man he becomes takes a little of the real one and gives nothing back, until he can no longer say for certain which face in the glass is his.

Then a cover asks a price paid in bodies, and to keep the lie standing he must sell out the one man in the cell who calls him a friend. Rhys walks away clean. The men who believed him do not.

In the white heat of Jeddah, hidden among the construction crews, he takes the hand of a soft-spoken young veteran of the war he helped win - and understands, too late to say it aloud, that he has had a hand in building the next one.

The Cyclone Inheritance opens The Persona, a Cold War espionage series in the tradition of John le Carré and Robert Ludlum. A tragedy in a thriller's clothes, where every win tastes like a loss by the last page - and the man who can become anyone is running out of anyone left to be.