Bucharest Principle #2 in the Marcus Vane Series

THE BUCHAREST PRINCIPLE A Marcus Vane Novel The message arrives at 3:47 in the morning. Four words. Cairo. Asset burned. Come. Marcus Vane thought he was done with this. Fourteen months of clean operations, bounded problems, cases that closed. Then Rania Aziz calls from Egypt with photographs of three intelligence assets who vanished without a trace — one in Damascus, one in Ankara, one in Cairo — each disappearing in the same way, at increasingly short intervals, from a list that came from inside their own network. Someone is burning the West's eyes in the Middle East. Methodically. On a clock. The trail leads Marcus from the rain-slicked boulevards of Bucharest to a lawyer's office in New York, from a Zurich coffee house confrontation with the man who built a private intelligence empire to a prison visiting room where Elliot Marsh — the traitor Marcus put away — is sitting with a smile that says I've been waiting for you to find this. The enemy this time isn't a government. It's a corporation. A private intelligence firm called CARDINAL, funded by Gulf sovereign wealth, contracted to make the West blind before a peace deal worth hundreds of billions closes. Two moles in two allied services. Twenty-two assets on a list. And a twelve-day window before the next name on it disappears. The Bucharest Principle is the propulsive sequel to Dead Reckoning — darker, wider, and more morally complex than its predecessor. A novel about what happens when the machinery of betrayal goes private, when the enemy has no flag to burn and no ideology to expose, only a balance sheet and a client list and the patience of ten years of careful construction. Marcus Vane is back.