On November 10, 2025, the Department of Veterans Affairs is brought to its knees by a series of cascading, asynchronous failures. The story unfolds through the eyes of a diverse cast of characters, each seeing a different piece of the puzzle: a veteran IT manager who relies on history and intuition, a brilliant young coder who trusts only in data, a compassionate nurse on the front lines of patient care, and a ruthless political operative who sees the chaos as a golden opportunity. Each perspective adds a new layer to the mystery, revealing a threat that is far more intelligent and personal than anyone can imagine.

At midnight on Veterans Day November 11, 2025, the ghost in the machine stops teaching and begins its real attack. Part II transitions to a linear, high-stakes thriller as the newly formed team races against a political deadline and a technical kill-switch. They must hunt a ghost through a digital infrastructure it knows better than they do, all while navigating a political firestorm in the heart of Washington D.C. To stop the attack, they must look beyond the code and find the answer in a shared promise, a forgotten friendship, and the very human heart of the system itself.

On the day before the nation honors its veterans, a ghost awakens in the machine. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, a series of seemingly unrelated, cascading system failures begin to cripple the nation’s largest healthcare system. What starts as a minor elevator outage at the D.C. Medical Center soon metastasizes into a full-blown crisis, corrupting patient data, shutting down vital services, and creating chaos on a national scale.

At the center of the storm is Mike Sanders, a seasoned IT manager and Air Force veteran who understands that the VA’s sprawling network is a living history, full of forgotten backdoors and digital scars. As he and his small team—including a brilliant but reckless young coder named Chris Harding—hunt for the source of the attacks, they quickly realize they are not dealing with a random hacker. They are facing a sophisticated, intelligent adversary who knows the system’s every secret, a ghost who can turn the tools of healing into weapons of terrifying precision.

As the clock ticks toward midnight on Veterans Day, the ghost’s true, chilling endgame is revealed. Mike and his unlikely allies must unravel a thirty-year-old conspiracy, a story of friendship and betrayal, to stop a final, unthinkable act of terror. To save the veterans they are sworn to protect, they must look beyond the code and find the answer in the one place the ghost never expected: the flawed, resilient, and unbreakable human heart of the system itself.

Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

I spent forty years as a United States civil servant, a career that took me from a GS-1 clerk—the lowest rung on the ladder—to the Senior Executive Service. Along the way, I had the privilege of working at the Pentagon, the Defense Mapping Agency, and, most profoundly, the Department of Veterans Affairs.

In all those years, in all those buildings, I was consistently struck by one, unshakable truth: the real work of government is done by the quiet, dedicated, and often unseen career employees. They are the institutional memory, the guardians of the long-term mission, the ones who remain long after the political appointees and high-priced contractors have moved on. They are the human heart of an impossibly complex machine.

I wrote The Janus Protocol to tell their story.

While the events of this novel are fictional, the world it inhabits is very real. It’s a world of immense challenges, where cutting-edge technology is layered over decades-old infrastructure, where the promise of the mission meets the hard prose of federal budgets, and where the lives of our nation’s heroes hang in the balance.

This book is, at its core, a techno-thriller. There is a ghost in the machine, a ticking clock, and a conspiracy that must be unraveled. But it is also a story about the people I was honored to serve alongside—the nurses, the IT managers, the executive assistants, the program analysts—the everyday heroes who show up, day after day, to do the work that matters.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. I hope you enjoy The Janus Protocol.