The Decentralized Directive
(2026)(The fifth book in the Jack Halloway series)
A novel by David Chisholm
A billion-dollar digital heist. A dead cypherpunk. A global financial apocalypse.
When the Granite Vault—a subterranean fortress built inside an abandoned silver mine to safeguard $1.2 billion in cold-storage cryptocurrency—is hit by a localized EMP and raided, the authorities are quick to pin the blame on the sole surviving engineer, Jeffrey Burdoff.Enter Jack Halloway. Jack isn't a traditional lawyer; he leads the Audit Bureau, a highly specialized investigative unit operating out of an armored mobile command center. Alongside his team of elite hackers and tactical experts, Jack realizes that catching the true culprit requires following the money across the decentralized blockchain.
But the thief isn't a cartel or a rogue state. It’s Gideon Lewis—a legendary cypherpunk pioneer who faked his death five years ago. Lewis isn't just looking to get rich. He is using the stolen billions to hoard global processing power for a devastating "51% attack". His goal: hijack the blockchain's consensus, erase the ledgers of major institutions, and burn the global banking system to the ground.
Stripped of their digital identities and hunted by mercenaries for a massive dark-web bounty, Jack and his team must launch a desperate, brute-force physical assault on a heavily fortified geothermal supercomputer. They must stop an untouchable digital god using the only weapon they have left: the unyielding friction of reality.
Genre: Thriller