A failed mission sends a British intelligence operative running for his life in this electrifying new thriller from the author of  The Break Line. Soldier, assassin, and special agent—Max McLean works for a highly secretive unit called The Unknown: a black ops team which delivers off-the-books justice on behalf of the British Government.  When a straightforward operation to kill a terrorist commander goes badly wrong, Max finds himself framed for murder. Cut off from his base and cut loose by his Government handlers, he’s forced to go even deeper underground, propelled across Europe on a personal, high-stakes investigation to clear his name. Racing against time to find out who his enemy is before his enemy finds him, Max has to unravel the only clue he has to their identity: an unusual hundred-dollar bill clutched in the dead terrorist’s fist.   But in this brutal game of spies nothing is as it seems: as hostile powers prepare to move against the West, Max McLean must face the shocking possibility that the traitor he seeks has been with him all along. James Brabazon  is an author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Based in the UK, he has traveled to more than seventy countries, investigating, filming, and directing in the world's most hostile environments. He is the author of  All Fall Down ,  The Break Line , and the international bestseller  My Friend the Mercenary , a memoir recounting his experiences of the Liberian civil war and the Equatorial Guinea coup plot. He divides his time between homes in London and on the south coast of England. 1   Monday, January 8, 2018   It was an easy kill.   He was trapped, hemmed in by the Atlantic and the wild country of Donegal. No road. No telephone. Nowhere to run.   On the seventh night I pulled the plug on the skiff tied up on the beach by his cottage. I settled into a gully a hundred and fifty meters from the front door and waited, a black shadow dripping rainwater in a muddy ditch. The moon was hidden by banks of cloud that rolled in across the ocean from Iceland. Thick, fast squalls cut visibility and drowned out everything except the waves ripping up the bay.   The tide had turned. Conditions were perfect.   He was alone. He went nowhere, did nothing, saw no one. He was scared. Or stupid. Or both. I didn't know who he was or what he'd done, but at seventy-five, he'd either forgotten how to run or didn't think he had to anymore. Maybe he just wasn't thinking at all. Desperate men live only in the present. That much I did know. For ten months I'd anticipated nothing beyond sunset. Since I was sixteen I'd seen no farther than the end of a barrel. The future was another country explored one day at a time. Interred in his thatched stone casket, he was waiting for someone or something. But whatever he was expecting, he wasn't expecting me.     HeÕd already been inside for two days before I arrived. I watched the house for a week from a holiday park across the bay. Our lives ground down to the same rhythm.   Each morning he rose at seven thirty.   He lit an oil lamp and kept the windows covered. Candle grease smeared the panes. Only the faintest of shadows cast on the age-browned curtains allowed me to track him from the living room to the bedroom and back again. No smoke leaked from the chimney. The rooms would be damp and cold and half-heated by Calor gas. There was no electricity. If he cooked at all, it would have been in the living room. There were only two proper rooms, and a wooden washhouse tacked on the back-an ancient extension, perhaps once an elderly relative's bedroom. Maybe it covered a wellhead. Maybe he drank his whisky neat. Either way, he'd need to resupply before long.   At dusk he lit the lamp again.   He extinguished it at ten.   And rose at seven thirty.   Moss grew on the roof. Weeds tangled the kitchen garden. Garden trash was piled against the back door. The cottage was desolate but not derelict-one of the few surviving remnants of a lost landscape of thatched poverty. Americans thought they were quaint. I thought they were more like millstones than monuments, tying us to a past that had got us where, exactly?   Here. Exactly.   I flexed my palm around the grip of the semiautomatic and focused on the rain-roar berating the headland.   The nearest house was five hundred meters to the northeast. It had been empty for a year-an unwanted holiday home languishing in negative equity. The track to its front door wound off to the main road four hundred meters farther on. Seven hundred meters to the southeast, a couple from Birmingham gazed out over Ulster in the midst of their retirement. Good luck with that. Drongawn Lough lay due south. Everywhere else was just rough sea or sodden turf.   I spent twelve hours in the gully. Out of habit I clicked a little pebble I'd picked off the beach against the back of my teeth. I didn't need it: the rainwater kept my throat moist and my head clear.   It was a two-man job. But, as usual, I was flying