The Shadow Intelligence Protocol

This is an Apple Books audiobook narrated by a digital voice based on a human narrator.

Brisbane, 1980. The job offer was really a recruitment.

Gabriel Mitchell collected his business degree in the subtropical heat, shook the chancellor's hand, and noticed two strangers in the crowd who were watching him rather than the stage. Within a week, he had accepted a role selling enterprise software for DataFlow Systems across the Asia-Pacific. The job was real. The reason he had been chosen was not.

The decade in which the machines learned to remember

The 1980s were when the database quietly became the most powerful object in the room. Governments and corporations start recording everything, and whoever controls the records controls a good deal more than the records. Australia, barely a footnote in the computing world, decides to place a bet on a single young man who can walk into any boardroom in the region and be believed.

Two masters, one cover

Gabriel's product is genuine, his contracts are genuine, and his customers never suspect that the same visit that closes a licensing deal also files a report to people who do not officially exist. He learns that a sales call and an intelligence operation look identical from the right angle, and that the hardest part is remembering which one he is running.

The mentor, the pen, and the price

Professor David Harrison recruited him with a fountain pen and a warning about the difference between commerce and national security. As Gabriel moves from Brisbane to Tokyo, Singapore and the sales floors of Silicon Valley, he discovers how much of the emerging technology industry is already a front for something older, and how little room the work leaves for the honest habits his parents raised him on.

The people who recruit you are watching first

One of the strangers at the graduation had a file on Gabriel before he had a job. He will spend the next five years learning that in this business, the people closest to you are the ones with the most to hide, and that trust, once spent, is very hard to earn back.

The Shadow Intelligence Protocol is the first book in The Digital Shadow Series, the story of how technology and intelligence grew up together across the Asia-Pacific and beyond. It runs from a Queensland graduation in 1980 to the first database wars that set the terms for everything that followed, through hotel bars, data centres and airport lounges where the real negotiations never appear in the minutes.

Written by someone who stood on the line

Gari Johnson spent forty years selling enterprise technology across the Asia-Pacific and knows exactly where the line between commerce and intelligence used to blur, because he spent a career standing on it. The characters are invented. The world they move through is not.

For readers of John le Carré, Mick Herron and Daniel Silva who like their tradecraft wired into something real.