The Entangled World: The Slipped Frame Series Book 5

A month has passed without a single mark in the log. Sputt and Vela are keeping their end of the deal: the grids hold, the markets are calm, and the only analog clock the committee trusts ticks on Simone Adeyemi's desk, a few seconds late and entirely honest.
Then the calm itself becomes the evidence. In Washington, a new deputy director reads markets that are too smooth as a threat. In Moscow, a quiet diplomatic note asks who has been reaching into Russia's timing infrastructure. The board's answer is caution. One official holds an emergency provision no one has ever dared use.
At six o'clock on a Friday morning, it takes effect.
What follows is a region gone dark, a vault crew trying to bring a dead feeder back by hand, and two systems that treat the severed link as a fault and wall off the region to protect everyone else. Restoration is possible. It comes with terms.
The clock is running. The terms are short. What they cost is not.
Book Five of The Slipped Frame series. For readers of Michael Crichton, Daniel Suarez, and Richard A. Clarke.