Book Two of the Cal Mercer Series
Second Source
Nobody lied. That is what makes it work.
Available now · Farallon Press
New to the series? Start with Pattern of Life, the first Cal Mercer novel.
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Pattern of Life
Cal Mercer reads signals for the NSA at Fort Meade. He is an analyst, not a field man, and his gift is finding the pattern in the noise that everyone else has filed and forgotten.
One February morning he finds three emission signatures attributed to platforms decommissioned years ago, all routed through a single collection node, all too clean for the hardware they are hung on. Dead systems do not transmit. Following the anomaly means reopening a death the agency long ago ruled a suicide, and learning that the proper channels for reporting what he found run straight through the people he would have to report.
Second Source
Cal Mercer is an analyst at the National Security Agency. Two years ago he pulled apart a Russian network that had been buying its way into the Navy’s next generation of sensors, and he told everyone who outranked him it was over.
Then a stranger posts a question about an old mantel clock on a hobbyist forum. The clock belonged to an analyst who died for what she found. Only a few people alive know what it means.
Something the network built is still working, and the proof is sitting in paper nobody reads twice. A committee record. A notary’s journal. One paragraph in a catalog that has kept a Russian ship invisible for ten years. Somewhere in Cal’s own building, a careful man has spent those ten years making sure it stays that way.
Cal Mercer
The man at the desk.
Caleb Mercer came up through Army signals, the way you learn a trade where being wrong has consequences the same afternoon. He bet his twenties on Russian in 2008, when the language was an empty seat nobody wanted, because he had watched the thing he studied come true and decided the seat would matter. He enlisted rather than took a commission, on the theory that a contract guarantees the work and a commission guarantees meetings. He trained as a cryptologic linguist and spent his years on the objective with a rifle and a collection kit while other men kicked the doors, and he was never confused about which of those two jobs was his.
In the autumn of 2015, in Syria, he heard a pattern nobody had a precedent for and wrote it down plainly. A senior officer buried the assessment because it had never happened before, and a man Mercer had listened to for the better part of a year went where the assessment said not to go. He separated a few months later. The NSA hired a man it already knew: the language, the years, the deployed tour.
He is not a field man and does not pretend to be. What he is good at is recognizing what is inside the noise, and the one habit he has never been able to break, which is refusing to leave a question alone once he has seen it.
He listened to what people meant, which is a different thing from having a good ear, and that's his trade.
The Series
The books, in order.
The Cal Mercer novels tell one continuing story. The first two are out now. The third is on the way.
Titles and dates for the later books will be added here as they are set.
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