When a piece of classified code vanishes from GCHQ, London doesn’t hear an explosion. It feels a silence.
The file is nicknamed the Lost Key, a powerful cryptographic tool capable of quietly unlocking secure systems across the West. Whoever controls it rewrites financial records, crashes infrastructure, and turns trusted networks into weapons.
Former SAS operator James O’Neill thought he’d left that world behind. Now working as a security consultant, he’s dragged back into the shadows when an old contact in MI5 slips him a warning: the Lost Key is on the move, bodies are starting to fall, and his name is suddenly appearing in the wrong briefings.
MI5 handler Sarah calls in the one man she trusts to retrieve it without leaving a trace: James O’Neill, ex-Special Forces, now a freelance security operator who lives by a simple rule, nothing counts until it happens three times, and you have to see all three.
From Belfast and London safe houses to Warsaw server rooms and shadow markets where data is traded like weapons, James is pulled into a hunt where every move is watched and every ally might be compromised. It becomes clear the Lost Key isn’t a test object gone astray.