The Apex Protocol

THE APEX PROTOCOL

John Mason survived an ambush that should have killed him. He came home with a Czech Shepherd named Kaiser, a desk at Langley, and nightmares that smell like diesel and cardamom.

The Agency calls him an analyst. His coworkers call him something else, quietly, when he leaves the room. He keeps his head down. He runs at four in the morning. He does not talk about Helmand.

Then a bank robbery goes wrong in the middle of downtown, and Mason ends it in under two minutes.

That is when the people who have been watching him decide it is time.

They are not the CIA. They are older, quieter, and they deal in things the public is not allowed to know exists. They offer Mason a partner, a badge that is not a badge, and a war against the monsters under the map.

What they do not offer him is the truth: that he is not there to hunt the monsters.

He is there because he might be one.

And the protocol written in his name was never meant to save the world.

It was meant to keep him from finding out what he could become.

A first-person thriller of cryptids, containment, and the man who was never supposed to wake up.