The Moscow Rules Are Dead
A Cold War Relic Thriller

About this book:

They taught him to survive the Cold War. Now his own lessons are hunting him.

George Baxter, sixty-eight, retired, and comfortably invisible in Vienna, spots a surveillance box on the Ringstraße that bears his signature—tradecraft he designed, drilled into Russian GRU officers in a Bavarian forest lodge in 1991. The team tailing him moves with the precision of men who learned at his knee. They know his counters before he deploys them. They know the Danube Box because he named it. And they've come to collect on a debt three decades overdue.

Armed with a Browning Hi-Power, a stack of dead passports, and a memory palace of buried assets, Baxter runs a dry clean through the labyrinth of the First District, turning the city's imperial grandeur into a kill zone. But this isn't a chase—it's a master class in reverse. Every alley reflection, every tram rhythm, every gatekeeper's carry forces him to confront the pupils who mastered his curriculum too well. One of the six from Bad Tölz has survived the collapse of empires, the rise of digital surveillance, and the long peace. Now the teacher must outthink the students who wrote the final exam in his own handwriting.