Two spies. One crossing in. One breaking out.

Neither prepared for what they’ll find.

Ash Stafford moves silently through Checkpoint Charlie, tasked with tracking a missing informant; what he uncovers in East Berlin is darker than secrets — it’s a carefully buried truth that was never meant to be found.

Ivan Vasin, the defector, walks into London with a smile and a dossier that could expose a devastating flaw in Britain’s nuclear shield. But is he here to warn — or to trigger?

In the shadows, two rivals pull the strings: Alec Harlesden, the MI6 man who always knows more than he says, and Dimitri Orlov, the architect of a new kind of weapon — built from the human mind. As loyalty fractures and identities unravel, the game becomes deadly clear. Who gets their spy back first — and at what cost?

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About the Author

Dan Musto grew up behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s — a childhood steeped in silence, suspicion, and the Cold War’s quiet pressure. He spent countless evenings with his family, listening to his parents and grandparents share vivid, often guarded stories about life under the watchful eye of the state. These tales of whispered conversations, ration cards, and the unspoken rules of survival became a living history lesson, shaping his fascination with espionage and the human cost of political conflict.

Now based in the UK, he channels that tension into dark, fast-paced espionage fiction.

The Shadow Protocol is his debut novel, a fast-paced Cold War thriller plunging readers into a world of mind games, double agents, and buried truths. As timelines converge and psychological warfare deepens, a brutal twist at the heart of the story redefines everything that came before. This is espionage fiction sharpened to a knife edge — where memory can be a weapon, and trust is the most dangerous lie of all.