Fire Line Zero Day
A Reverse-Chronology Techno-Thriller

About this book:

The Black Ridge Wildfire didn't start with a spark. It started with a line of code.

When fire behavior analyst Silas Ward arrives at the calcined remains of a fortified data center buried beneath a Colorado mountain, the official story is clean: a prescribed burn gone wrong, a freak microburst, half a billion dollars in ashes. But the trees tell a different tale—their char rings are uniform, not wind-driven. The vault's blast doors were blown outward, not inward. And embedded in the vault's lock mechanism sits a fingernail-sized chip that shouldn't exist: a hardware bridge that convinced the security system everything was normal while something—or someone—drained the drives.

Now Silas is chasing the fire backward through time, day by day, through a reverse chronology that peels back the smoke to reveal the architecture of the perfect crime. From the synthetic sensor feeds that fooled an entire incident command into evacuating the valley, to the rogue algorithm compiled six days before the burn was even authorized, every chapter rewinds closer to the ignition point. But Aethelgard Logistics has its own cleanup crew on the ground, the server logs are hours from permanent deletion, and the rain is coming to wash it all away. To find the truth, Silas has to burn through the lies—before the ground goes completely cold.