The Rose Protocol

The Rose Protocol by MK Whiting

The formula was buried in 1952. It was never supposed to resurface.

James Conquest is a Connecticut commuter with a wife, two kids, and a private pilot's license. He's not the kind of man conspiracies happen to. Then he grabs what he thinks is a thriller for the train and gets home to find the dust jacket was on the wrong book: an old physics textbook, its margins filled with handwritten equations and increasingly frantic notes.

He shows a friend. His friend posts a fragment online, hoping someone can identify it.

Someone does.

Within a day, his friend is dead, and James understands, too late, that the equations in his bag aren't an academic curiosity. They're worth killing for, a secret so dangerous people have spent decades keeping it buried.

With Lola Kennedy, a laid-off analyst who saw the other side of the cover-up, James follows the trail to the one man who can explain it: the physicist who built it and has spent a lifetime hiding from what he created. The people protecting the secret are closing in. What James and Lola find will force a choice neither of them is ready to make, and someone is already willing to kill to make it for them.

The truth could change everything. Some will kill to keep it hidden.