"An exciting tale of another path to super intelligence." —Vernor Vinge, three-time Hugo Award–winning author of A Fire Upon the Deep Jonathan Knox is one of the country's most sought-after management consultants, not least for his uncanny skill at intuiting the solution hidden in the noise. Blessing though it may be to his clients, Knox's so-called pattern-matching ability began as a curse. The only saving grace is that it blundered him into a relationship with Marianna Bonaventure, an Energy Department agent charged with keeping track of nuclear proliferation risks . . . from behind a desk. Her only foray into fieldwork so far was the mission where she first teamed with Jon Knox, the one where they'd sort of saved the world. Now she's on another case with Jon, investigating the disappearance of billionaire tech genius Davoud Ansari's daughter Fatimah. Nietzsche is the artificial intelligence built by Ansari's company, Psyche Industries, helping Marianna and John with the investigation. But Nietzsche is also a machine with a secret agenda. Hamza Nassiri is a deep-cover agent for Iran's feared Quds Force. Posing as Psyche Industries' security chief, Hamza is laboring in secret to undermine the MERGE, an intelligence analysis capability of unthinkable power. Before it comes on line, he must use Fatimah Ansari to bring down MERGE and the country along with it.
