Devil's Passage

A pawn in his pocket. A bounty on his head. A city full of people who would like to balance a very old ledger.

In Istanbul, former SAS operator Matt "Johno" Johnson has been living between the cracks. A deniable asset working low-profile security contracts, trying to stay one step ahead of a Haqqani death sentence that has shadowed him since an operation in Afghanistan in 2001. For fifteen years he's been a line item on someone else's budget: expendable, temporary, expected to die somewhere off the books.

When a body surfaces in the Golden Horn, a long-forgotten name from Johno's Hereford days, executed with professional care, the past stops being something he can outrun. Within hours, his phone pings with a single move on a private chess application, a code phrase from the only man who ever truly understood him: the "ghost" of Grozny and architect of a covert Soviet-era programme that never quite died.

The move means just one thing: The Ghost is in play again.

As Turkish counter‑intelligence, a patient Haqqani network, Moscow's Yasenevo desks and Western "back rooms" all converge on the same narrow streets of Istanbul, Johno is forced to decide whether he is the piece being moved or the player making the board. Old debts from Chechnya and Erbil come due on the hills above the Bosphorus, where every crossing is a passage somebody has to pay for.

Devil's Passage is the third novel in The Operator Series: a tense, slow-burn espionage thriller about loyalty, long-tail vendettas and the cost of being useful for too long in too many people's wars. It will appeal to readers of John le Carré, Mick Herron and Olen Steinhauer, anyone who likes their spy fiction morally complex, emotionally precise, and impossible to put down.