Elliot Kane

There is a dark side to MI6 that needs men like Elliot Kane-volatile, inquisitive, free-floating-in the field. They take them and put two years and over £100k into their training, showing them how to steal cars, strip weapons, and hack bank accounts. There are courses on the use of blackmail and improvised explosives, and entire workshops solely dedicated to navigating by the stars. But no one tells them how to go home. Kane has spent fifteen years managing events overseas that never make the papers. He is a ghost in his own life, assuming and shedding personalities as each new cover story comes into play. But when the woman he loves, another operative named Joanna Lake, vanishes without a trace in Kazakhstan, he is forced center stage in his own life. Drawn ever deeper into a realm of deception and conflicting agendas, Kane moves from merely infiltrating events to steering them. While he's well-versed in modern psychological warfare, snowbound Kazakhstan presents unique challenges-poised between China, Russia, and the West, dictatorship and democracy, state intelligence and an increasingly powerful world of private agencies, it's impossible to work out who is manipulating whom. And Kane's not the only one trying to figure out where Joanna Lake has gone or what she learned before disappearing.

British spy Elliot Kane is forced out of semi-retirement to investigate a colleague's suspicious death on Ascension Island, a remote and rocky outpost of the British military in the middle of the Atlantic. Despite uncovering a deep plot to incite a new world war, Elliot Kane has been on probation with the service since his misadventures in Kazakhstan. Having taken up a job teaching college literature and linguistics, he surprisingly enjoys living a conventional life and wonders if he would even go back to spycraft. Then a colleague from an ages-ago mission reaches out with a request. One of her tech specialists was on a long-term mission, in deep cover, but has suddenly killed himself. The agency is afraid to finish this vital mission without knowing what prompted this seemingly healthy man to take his own life. The carrot in this offer is helping his old friend, the stick is a worse punishment from the Agency if he doesn't comply. So, Elliott poses as an academic researcher and heads to one of the most remote places on the planet, Ascension Island. Arriving on a rocky, barely livable island located in the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between Brazil and Angola, Kane is unsure whom to trust and why this lonely outpost is so important to the British military... until he uncovers dangerous secrets that lead straight back to London's highest offices.