A new thriller
The Guardian Protocol
Every fifty seconds, fourteen hundred watches transmit a pulse to a satellite constellation. Position. Heart rate. Blood oxygen. Encrypted.
Except they're not.
Every fifty seconds, fourteen hundred watches transmit a pulse to a satellite constellation. Position. Heart rate. Blood oxygen. Encrypted.
Kurt Bauer built the Guardian — a smartwatch designed to protect the world's most powerful people. Heads of state. NATO commanders. The Pope. Four generations of Swiss watchmaking precision, married to military-grade satellite communications. His name is on every dial.
Then his chief engineer discovers a phantom signal. A duplicate transmission, firing 0.4 seconds before each satellite handshake, broadcasting raw biometric data on an unencrypted frequency. Every Guardian on the planet has been compromised. Every pulse is a targeting package.
And the engineer has vanished.
To stop it, Bauer will have to go dark. No watch. No network. No allies he can trust. Just the skills he learned in five years of protecting the Pope — and a trail that leads from Swiss server rooms to Jordanian safehouses to the oldest corridors of power in the Western world.
The Guardian Protocol is a precision-engineered thriller about surveillance, loyalty, and the distance between protection and control. The first book in a new series.
The server room was cold. It was always cold. Sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit, held there by six Liebert cooling units that ran twenty-four hours a day and sounded like the inside of a commercial refrigerator. The air tasted of recirculated plastic and ozone.
Kurt Bauer stood in front of the wall. Twelve screens. Three rows of four. Each one showing a different slice of the Guardian network: satellite handshake logs, telemetry feeds, biometric dashboards, a world map studded with fourteen hundred green dots. Each dot a watch. Each watch a pulse. Position, heart rate, blood oxygen, skin temperature. Every fifty seconds.
His jacket was on the back of a chair. Sleeves rolled to the forearms. His tie was in the jacket pocket, folded once, not balled. He'd been standing for forty minutes.
He was not supposed to be here. He was supposed to be at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, at a table with the CEOs of two defence contractors and the Swiss consul general, eating something with truffle oil and talking about satellite bandwidth. He'd been there. He'd ordered the fish. He'd eaten half of it. Then his phone had buzzed against his thigh, and he'd read the message under the table, and he'd put his napkin down and left between courses without saying goodbye.
That was three hours ago.
John Michael Hadley writes thrillers about the systems that keep powerful people safe — and what happens when those systems fail.
His work sits at the intersection of technology and tradecraft: satellite networks, biometric surveillance, and the quiet vulnerabilities hidden inside the infrastructure we trust. The kind of things that function perfectly until someone finds the seam.
The Guardian Protocol is his debut novel. He is currently at work on the sequel.
For press enquiries, rights, or to get in touch: contact@johnmichaelhadley.com
Download the full classified personnel dossier on Kurt Bauer — Asset WATCHMAKER — before you read The Guardian Protocol.
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