Cold Meridian

COLD MERIDIAN

The Complete Origin Story

In March 2017, FBI Special Agent Charlie Kaplan opens a wall safe behind a painting in a dead man's bedroom and finds that a war which supposedly ended in 1989 has never actually stopped.

The dead man is Spencer Curry, a Portland bank compliance officer with a staged suicide and a coded confession addressed to a daughter he never told the truth. Within hours, Charlie learns his real name: Aleksander Nikitin, a KGB officer who defected during Poland's 1981 martial law crackdown and spent thirty-six years buried under an identity built by people who valued his silence more than his safety. The cipher in his safe protects a discovery dormant since 1867: a twelve-day discrepancy between two calendars that could still hand Alaska back to Russia. Charlie's own inheritance, his father's tradecraft, taught to him as a child and mistaken for education, turns out to be the only training that applies now.

Five years later, in Through Amber Glass, Charlie is reunited in Gdańsk with Natasha Koroleva, the woman whose defection gave him his life's second chapter. The crisis that brings them together is not the one either of them chose, and the amber trade that built this city - resin that keeps a leaf whole by never letting it go - runs under every room they walk through.

This omnibus edition collects the complete Origin Duology, The Gdańsk Gambit and Through Amber Glass, in one volume for the first time, and restores material available nowhere else: expanded 1981 sequences drawn from the novella The Second Key, woven into the narrative to complete Nikitin's transformation from courier to defector, and to give Sofia Dubienska, the mathematician whose cipher started all of it, the fuller account her role has always deserved.

Two novels. One inheritance. The meridian that runs beneath everything, dividing the ones who kept the secrets from the ones who paid for them.