Out of the Bunker. A Wyatt Mercer Thriller - M. Eigh

A Lone SEAL. A Bunker He Was Never Going to Leave. A Daughter Who Built His Trap Without Knowing.

Wyatt Mercer spent ten years three hundred and eighty feet under the Cascades. He grew his own tobacco. He cast the I Ching at twenty-two thirty every night. He read the Wilhelm-Baynes his wife had given him in 1992. The world above had moved on without him. He had counted on it.

Then a glass bottle dropped down the air-sample chute. Inside: a Polaroid of his thirty-two-year-old daughter, zip-tied to a chair. A burner phone. Twenty-four hours to surface. Bring the wallet.

Above ground, the world is full of AI agents he cannot read, deepfakes he cannot verify, and a private intelligence firm whose model has been narrowing him to a five-acre patch of mountain for fourteen months. The voice on the phone sounds like his daughter. The pause before the third question is a quarter-second wrong. The men who designed the bottle have been preparing to kill him for ten years. They have help his world has not yet seen.

Wyatt has the I Ching, a Sig Sauer P226, the small silent grammar of a wife who has been dead for seven years and whose voice he carries in the back of his throat, and a brain trained in 2003 by a CIA polygraph-defeat program that left him unable to affirm a falsehood. The men who want him dead have a model that calculates what he will do next, the way a room of jurors who do not breathe and do not sleep updates its verdict on him every time he moves.

Out of the Bunker is the first book of The Wyatt Mercer Files - a five-book cycle of compact thrillers from M. Eigh and Red Lantern Press. Designed to be read in a single sitting. For readers of Mark Dawson, Mark Greaney, Gregg Hurwitz, and Daniel Suarez.