THE TEHRAN PROTOCOL

A Cole Ryder Thriller

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A nuclear device has been assembled inside Iran. One asset knows the disarm code. Two governments want him — for very different reasons.

Cole Ryder is a CIA contractor with a Farsi file, a go-bag under his bunk, and a six-year-old photograph of a woman whose father he failed to save. When a source codenamed FIREBOLT reports that a crude nuclear weapon is moving overland toward the Iraqi border, Cole is sent into Iran alone — no uniform, no backup, no official existence — to reach the physicist who built it before the device reaches its target.

Yael Katz is a Mossad field operative sent on the same mission with a second set of orders she hasn't been told to share. The CIA believes FIREBOLT is their source. He isn't. The Vienna relay through which his intelligence flows is an Israeli construction — three years of architecture the Americans don't know they're standing on. If the physicist survives extraction and talks, the network unravels. Yael's job is to make sure he doesn't.

Dr. Omid Khalaji is the physicist. He designed the weapon. He also designed the trigger mechanism that will detonate it if anyone tries to disarm it without his six-digit code — a code he built from his daughter's birth year and his wife's death and which he has told no one. He has been carrying the weight of what he built for three years. He has decided to stop.

Three people. Three agendas. Seventy-two hours. One device.

Set against the mountains and checkpoints of western Iran, The Tehran Protocol is a propulsive espionage thriller about what happens when the math of institutions collides with the math of conscience — when "correct" and "right" stop being the same category, and the people in the field have to choose which one to follow.

For readers of Daniel Silva, Jason Matthews, Mark Greaney, and John le Carré.

The Tehran Protocol is the first book in the Cole Ryder series. The Beirut Contingency is coming.