Lateral Movement

By JOE BEAMS

At 2:47 AM on a Tuesday, Marcus "Ghost" Reeves breaks into a defense contractor's network looking for a payday. What he finds instead is MERIDIAN - a domestic surveillance program tracking forty-seven thousand American citizens. Journalists. Congressional staffers. Civil liberties attorneys. People who threatened the program's existence.

Some of them are dead.

Within seventy-two hours, Marcus is the most wanted hacker in the country. The FBI is building a case. Paladin Defense Systems has hired a methodical, relentless security chief named Derek Sato to find him. And a man named Colonel Harmon is offering a fifth option Marcus didn't know he had: join an off-the-books cyber operations team, or face prison.

There's a catch. The team's first mission is cleaning up Marcus's mess - and the people who built MERIDIAN will kill to protect it.

Marcus has always worked alone. He's never trusted a partner, never followed someone else's plan, never had to care whether his mistakes got other people hurt. Now he's the weakest link on a team of specialists who are risking everything on his intelligence - and his ability to stop being the person who got them into this.

The evidence is on three hard drives. The truth is in forty-seven thousand names. And the only way out is through a system that was designed to make people like Marcus disappear.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GQPW4PH3
• ISBN13: 9798250201803
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"