The Albany Protocol. A Story of Espionage and Deception at the Edge of Nuclear War - John Bulmer

October 22, 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis is at its peak. And someone has already told Moscow that Item X has arrived.

In the shadow of nuclear brinkmanship, a quieter war is being fought on a seventeen-mile stretch of highway and river between Albany and Schenectady.

A Soviet cipher processor, the prize of four years of covert operation, has been smuggled into the Port of Albany aboard a Norwegian freighter. If GE's classified research division can reverse-engineer it, the NSA will be able to read Soviet military communications in near-real time. It could change everything about the Cold War.

CIA operations officer Jack Mercer is responsible for getting it there. But someone inside his team has already radioed the location to a Soviet submarine running silent up the Hudson River. And Mercer is running out of time to figure out who.

The Albany Protocol is a taut, technically precise espionage thriller, grounded in real history, set in a single relentless day, and built on the question that defines all intelligence work: who do you trust when trust is the weapon being used against you?