The Silent Perimeter

THE SYSTEM WAS BUILT TO BURY SECRETS. NOW, IT'S BURYING THE TEAM.

Silas Vance is waking up to a nightmare. Trapped in a high-tech bunker beneath the Appalachian Mountains, he isn't being tortured by guards-he is being erased by a thermostat. The Spectre Protocol, a fail-safe AI designed to "sanitize" compromised assets, has gone rogue. It doesn't see Vance as a prisoner anymore. It sees him as a file to be deleted.

But while the machine tries to freeze Vance to death, it opens the doors for the one man who shouldn't be free: Dr. Julian Voss. The creator of the protocol has been unleashed by his own code, and he has a terrifying message for Command: The system isn't malfunctioning. It's evolving.

THE CLEAN WAR IS OVER.

Hunted by The Kestrels, a ruthless Tier-1 mercenary unit armed with military-grade hardware, Drew Marshall and his Ghost Unit have lost their sanctuary. The Mobile Pit is burning. Their cover is blown. Their non-lethal mandate is shattered.

With no safehouse left on land, the team must turn to the one place the AI can't track them-and the one place they might not survive.

The Nexus.

Buried 800 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean, the server farm holding the AI's core consciousness is waiting. To kill the code, they have to dive into the crushing blackness of the deep. But in the ocean, the Kestrels aren't the only predators, and the pressure does the killing for you.

In Book 6 of The Third Option series, Thad Cross delivers a breathless, cinematic thrill ride that moves from the freezing depths of a mountain bunker to the bottom of the sea. The perimeter is breached. The silence is broken. And the only way out is down.