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The Alignment Protocol
Paperback
Series: The Zhao & Cross, Book 5
Publisher: Shaun Smit
Published: Jun 30 2026
Pages: 140
Weight: 0.37
Height: 0.33 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
She trusted the system to tell her the truth.
The system had been taught to lie.
CIA analyst Maya Zhao and NSA cryptographer Dr. Ethan Cross are three days into a quiet European getaway when a single encrypted message ends it. Their director has been suspended - neutralized by an investigation built from the inside, by someone close enough to know exactly where to strike.
With no task force, no institutional backing, and a mole hiding somewhere inside the highest levels of American intelligence, Maya and Ethan race across four countries to find the one man who can expose the truth: a terrified financial architect who helped build something no one was supposed to find - a four-year operation that has quietly taught the West's most trusted intelligence systems to look the other way.
Every assessment. Every threat rating. Every decision built on data that was never as clean as it looked.
As the walls close in, Maya and Ethan discover that the person feeding their enemy's network may be someone who has sat three desks from their director for years - and that exposing him means surviving long enough to prove it, before the corrupted system produces one catastrophic decision the world will never be able to take back.
The fifth novel in the Maya Zhao & Ethan Cross series, The Alignment Protocol is a high-stakes thriller about trust, betrayal, and the terrifying gap between what our systems tell us and what's actually true.
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