The Prometheus Protocol: A Cold War Thriller (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 1)

They rebuilt Nazi Germany from the inside. One man was sent to stop them.

Vienna, 1947. The ruins of war are still smouldering when former OSS operative Daniel Rourke arrives at the Westbahnhof on a routine commission: find a missing journalist. He witnesses a man shot dead on the platform before he clears the arrivals gate. In the dead man’s coat: a note. PROMETHEUS KNOWS. THEY HAVE GREER. GET OUT NOW.

He doesn’t get out.

What Rourke uncovers beneath Vienna’s occupied streets is not a ratline. It is something far more dangerous — a network of former SS officers, SD analysts, and Gestapo administrators who have been systematically placed inside the Allied occupation apparatus by a man the world believes is dead. SS-Brigadeführer Reinhard Brauer. A strategic genius who spent the war perfecting the art of institutional infiltration. A man who does not negotiate. A man who hunts.

The Prometheus Protocol is Brauer’s masterwork: forty-seven Allied officials, ministers, and intelligence officers, coerced or recruited, each in a critical institutional position. Each awaiting activation. When the Allied Control Commission’s settlement review convenes in March, Brauer’s network will trigger simultaneously — and the post-war order will be shaped by men whose loyalties belong to a buried Reich.

Rourke has seventeen days and four unlikely allies: a Hungarian forger who built Brauer’s documentation empire and wants out, a journalist who survived sixteen days of captivity with his evidence intact, a German analyst who spent three years building a secret case from inside the network, and a man named Wendt — PROMETHEUS’s own enforcer — whose calculation is quietly shifting.

Then Brauer learns the investigation has found him.

He calls in his Soviet contacts. He builds a strike force. He begins to hunt.

And the investigation’s safest addresses start to burn.

From the neon-soaked back alleys of the Second District to a mountain retreat in the Salzkammergut. From a Prater rooftop pursuit to a medieval church sacristy at one in the morning. The Prometheus Protocol is Cold War espionage at its most propulsive — an intricate, relentless thriller in the tradition of Ludlum, le Carré, and Deighton.

Perfect for fans of: The Bourne Identity · The Spy Who Came In from the Cold · The ODESSA File · Berlin Game · The Day of the Jackal · Alan Furst · Daniel Silva · Charles McCarry

The Sentinel Trilogy continues in THE LENINGRAD COVENANT.