The Biotech Protocol

A pathogen that doesn't kill everyone. It kills you based on your DNA. Six months after dismantling a quantum encryption conspiracy that nearly brought down the global financial system, CIA analyst Maya Zhao and NSA cryptographer Dr. Ethan Cross are back — and the threat they're facing is worse. A routine WHO surveillance flag leads them to a Russian molecular biologist operating outside every regulatory framework that exists. Dr. Alexei Volkov has spent seven years in a private laboratory doing what the ethics boards told him was impossible. He's not building a weapon of mass destruction. He's building something more precise: a pathogen engineered to read your genetic ancestry and decide whether you live. When a respiratory cluster in Jakarta resolves without casualties, Maya's team recognises it for what it is — not an outbreak, a calibration run. Version 1. The real weapon is already finished. As Mumbai burns and the case count climbs past four hundred, Maya and Ethan race to find a facility that doesn't officially exist, run a mole investigation that fractures the team from the inside, and build a case that has to hold up in rooms they're not supposed to be in. Behind Volkov is Victoria Merchant — the adversary they dismantled once, who pivoted without pausing, who has been building something larger and more patient than any single weapon. Something that doesn't need to threaten governments. Something that makes them irrelevant. The Biotech Protocol is the second book in the Zhao & Cross Series — a techno-thriller grounded in the real science of gain-of-function research, pharmacogenomic targeting, and the institutional blind spots that make the next pandemic possible. Smart. Taut. Terrifying in all the right ways. Book One: The Decoherence Protocol — available now. Book Three: The Grid Protocol — coming soon.