The Alignment Protocol: Book II of the Protocol Series

A machine twelve thousand years old. Sixty-one days until it speaks.

Eight months ago, orbital systems engineer Daniel Mercer shifted every atomic clock on Earth by six milliseconds and proved that the builders of humanity's oldest ruins left something running. Then he vanished. Now he works from a rented room in Cusco, mapping what no one else will admit is there. Five installations. Three continents. One machine, powered by the heat of the planet, still counting toward a date only he understands: April 23rd.

When the archaeologist who found the fifth site is murdered on the Nazca Plateau, the encrypted file she sends in her final hours starts the countdown for real. The Meridian Group and its impossibly reasonable director already know what the machine is, and they intend to be the ones holding it when it wakes. Sensing them, the machine has started to wake early.

Daniel came to expose a signal. He stays for a harder question, one twelve thousand years in the making. Not whether to answer it. What humanity says when something is finally listening. Because the beacon was never built to carry a message. It was built to carry a mind.

The Alignment Protocol is built on real archaeology and real science by John W. Taggart, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who writes the kind of thriller where the history checks out and the questions it raises are the ones nobody wants to answer. For readers of James Rollins, Douglas Preston, and Dan Brown.

Book Two of the Protocol Series, part of the twelve-novel Resonance Universe. New to the series? Start with The Recurrence Protocol.