The Edelweiss Cipher

She guards a secret that could rewrite the future. They'll stop at nothing to own it. In the timeless Swiss village of Alpenruh, Anja Weber is the last in a long line of master watchmakers. Her life is one of quiet precision, spent restoring antique timepieces and guarding her brilliant grandfather's greatest legacy: the designs for the Edelweiss escapement. A revolutionary mechanism, it's rumored to be a perpetual motion engine—virtually frictionless and completely untraceable. When a charming, mysterious stranger named Liam O'Connell arrives from London, Anja's ordered world shatters. A brutal break-in reveals he is not the tourist he appears to be, and that powerful, shadowy forces now hunt for her grandfather's work. Their goal: to weaponize its unique properties for a new era of untraceable global surveillance. Forced to flee her alpine sanctuary, Anja has no choice but to trust Liam, the very man whose past actions put a target on her back. Together, they are plunged into a deadly game of cat and mouse through the streets of London, from the tranquil South Bank to the glass-and-steel fortresses of Canary Wharf. But the hunters are always one step ahead. To survive, Anja must transform from a quiet guardian into a cunning strategist. The key to victory lies not in running, but in turning the tables. The final secret isn't on paper—it's locked inside a single, legendary watch, hidden in the most secure horological archive in the world. Now, the watchmaker and the spy must pull off an impossible heist: to steal back a masterpiece from the heart of a fortress, before time runs out for them both.