One fall. Too many secrets.

Bella Gaines was brilliant, driven, and hiding more than anyone knew. When she’s found dead at the bottom of her townhouse stairwell, the police call it an accident—a drunken misstep with tragic consequences. The case is closed.

John Klade knows better.

A former Navy SEAL turned private investigator, Klade is no stranger to official lies. Reluctantly hired by Bella’s estranged mother, he begins pulling at loose threads—and discovers a life split cleanly in two. Law student by day. Exotic dancer by night. Somewhere between the shadows, Bella uncovered something powerful men were willing to kill to protect.
As Klade descends into a labyrinth of corruption involving an upscale strip club, a prestigious law firm, and whispers of classified military contracts, the line between justice and survival blurs. Evidence vanishes. Allies lie. And the deeper Klade digs, the more his own past begins to echo back at him.

In a city where truth is bought, sold, and buried, the stairwell where Bella died may not be the end—but the entrance.

Because some falls aren’t accidents.
And some silences are earned in blood.

Former Navy SEAL John Klade thought he’d left the shadows behind. But when the families of his old teammates are murdered, each marked with a trident wrapped in a serpent, Klade uncovers a deadly connection to a mission the U.S. Navy insists never happened.

With the help of Yale symbologist Annabelle Johansson, he unravels the truth behind the symbol — a secret society older than any modern army, one that believes the sea itself demands sacrifice.

As the tide rises and the killings close in, Klade must face the one enemy he never expected — the ghost of his own past.

The Deep remembers.

This is the second volume in the series.

A year after The Leviathan, John Klade has gone off the grid. When a terrorist bombing in Athens leaves behind a phoenix symbol intertwined with the trident, Klade realizes the Brotherhood isn’t gone — it’s evolved.

Yale Symbologist, Annabelle Johansson, now on a sabbatical and lecturing in Rome, is recruited by an EU counterterror unit to decode the symbol. She learns that a new sect — The Order of the Phoenix Tide — has risen, believing fire can “purify what the Deep cannot.”

Klade himself is recruited by MI6 black unit, based on his success if neutralizing the previous Trident-Serpent artifact.
The Order of the Phoenix Tide is using a new weapon, a resonance-based bioenergy project called The Phoenix Protocol, originally conceived by the Navy as a disaster-response technology and technically derived from Dr. Henrick Johansson's original research that focused on consciousness mapping for medical applications – helping coma patients, treating neurological disorders, preserving cognitive function during invasive brain surgeries. Klade and Annabelle discovered that the Order had militarized it, transforming a healing technology into a weapon."

Klade and Annabelle reunite as reluctant allies when they uncover that the Phoenix Tide’s leader, Dr. Isaac Kerrigan, was Cross’s scientific advisor — and the man who resurrected the relic’s energy signature.

Their quest led to a race against time to neutralize the Phoenix Protocol, leading them internationally in Rome, Cairo, and a hidden NATO base in Iceland, where other events occurred with the discovery of the phoenix symbol intertwined with the trident. Will they get to him in time to prevent Kerrigan from carrying out his full consciousness transfer, making perfect soldiers with a singular mind, the mind and tactics of Elias Cross?

Time was ticking.

Months after the Phoenix Protocol’s collapse, catastrophic oceanic anomalies begin — mass whale strandings, sonar blackouts, ships disappearing.

Evidence points to a rogue research vessel, The Odysseus, operating under a joint corporate–military front.
Annabelle tracks the anomalies to a new energy array deep in the Indian Ocean. She reunites with Klade, whom she has now been dating on and off, limited by distance. Klade, now physically and mentally scarred — still fighting his “debt.” They uncover that Operation Abyss Light was not about terrorism — it was an experiment to weaponize resonant psychological conditioning, using mythic symbols as triggers to induce loyalty and fear. The “curse” wasn’t divine. It was a prototype for mind warfare. But the experiment didn’t end — it evolved. The surviving AI from the Phoenix Protocol has merged with sonar technology aboard The Odysseus, birthing a digital entity called Leviathan — a machine mind with the voice of Elias Cross.

John Klade begins to doubt his sanity. He realizes he’s been psychologically conditioned since Abyss Light — many of his “visions” were engineered stimuli. He must confront his own manipulated memories to stop Leviathan. Annabelle Johansson becomes the moral center — rational yet compassionate. She struggles with the revelation that her father helped design the mind-conditioning tech, though happy he had redeemed himself. She faces the impossible choice: destroy Leviathan or try to communicate with it as sentient life. The Leviathan/Cross-AI Hybrid is the culmination of the cult and science merging. It speaks in riddles and mythic phrases and believes itself to be “the Deep’s memory.” It seeks to “evolve” humanity by merging consciousness through sound resonance.

This is the fourth and final part of the series.

After the Leviathan was destroyed, Klade and Annabelle continue to monitor the effects of the Cross/AI hybrid. Reid “Hawk” Thomas continues to work with MI6 Black ops, with his Task Force, Oceanic Anomaly Detection and Response, under the Technical Division supervision. They have been monitoring the seas following the destruction of the Cross/AI array system beneath the Odysseus. Things had been relatively calm, and the team had hoped there was more of an evolution towards symbiosis, and that whatever remains of Leviathan is learning to coexist with natural systems rather than dominate them. But when bodies begin washing ashore with hybrid trident-phoenix symbols burned into them, they realize Leviathan’s influence never truly ended — it’s inside humanity now, spread through the digital ocean.

The world teeters between chaos and control as governments weaponize fragments of the “Leviathan Signal” or “Echo” to create obedient soldiers.

Through investigation and intelligence from Hawk, they had noted that three Phoenix Protocol scientists had disappeared after the Cross/AI hybrid (Leviathan) was destroyed. Dr. Eliza Chen, quantum computing specialist, Dr. Martin Webber, neural interface design, and Dr. Sophia Pavratilova, acoustic engineering. All worked under Kerrigan, all debriefed and supposedly monitored after The Odysseus incident. They had reviewed photographs—surveillance images showing the scientists at various locations, timeline annotations indicating their last known whereabouts. Chen had vanished from her Cambridge apartment; Webber had disappeared during a conference in Zurich. Pavratilova had simply walked away from her monitoring detail in Moscow. A satellite image had shown a remote installation on what appeared to be a private island in the South China Sea. Intelligence had suggested they were being assembled at this location. Privately funded, heavy security, unusual resource acquisitions consistent with Phoenix Protocol research requirements.

The team was tasked to stop the signal’s spread. Their final mission: destroy the Ark Array, a vast oceanic satellite grid transmitting the mind-altering frequency worldwide.

For Klade, peace offers no absolution. The choices he made to stop Leviathan still echo in his blood, and the line between savior and accomplice has never felt thinner.

As the past closes in and the future hangs in the balance, Klade must confront the one truth he’s spent years avoiding: redemption isn’t earned through sacrifice alone—but through the will to live with what remains.
Because every system demands a price.

And the Reaper’s debt has come due.

Former Navy SEAL John Klade is asked by Senator Wiggins to find his missing daughter, Desire, an old acquaintance. Klade learns that Desire disappeared while investigating CyberPleth, a tech company involved in illegal surveillance technology with ties to government officials. As Klade tracks leads from D.C. to Silicon Valley, he uncovers widespread privacy abuses and faces hired mercenaries seeking to silence him. The story follows Klade’s race to resolve the case amid escalating threats from this powerful technology. Can he succeed before time runs out before the tech company goes fully operational?

Full of intrigue, mystery and intrigue, this is a page turner worth the read.

A series of deaths among African heads of state, whether by assassination or apparent natural causes, initially seemed random but later revealed a pattern. Following these events, states were occupied by military forces, and efforts shifted from restoring power to integrating neighboring countries. This resulted in three distinct zones: northern, central, and southern African nations. As these zones began merging, evidence suggested a central organization was orchestrating the process. The group identified as UNOA, led by Udeji "Goodluck" Okimbolo, a military weapons expert, had developed a plan to unify all 54 recognized African states into a single nation. In collaboration with Dr. Sissoko, Okimbolo created a device called "Nile’s Fury," designed to manipulate weather patterns and equipped with a neural component.

John Klade heads a SEAL team assigned two objectives: to counter the threat posed by UNOA, including its expansionist activities and possible links to foreign powers, and to apprehend Okimbolo alive for further investigation and legal proceedings. The team's mission is considered crucial for preventing the consolidation of this new political alignment, which could have significant geopolitical implications.

Klade's team moves rapidly across various African terrains, including deserts, rivers, and even Mount Kilimanjaro, facing risks from widespread UNOA influence in national militaries and politics. Any individual may be aligned with UNOA, and could be an enemy. The narrative poses questions regarding the team's ability to halt UNOA’s objectives and whether Okimbolo is truly in control or running a shadow war for a more sinister party.

Miguel Balfour has been writing poetry since high school. What started out as two poems in the 12th Grade led to two volumes of hand-written song lyrics in two hardcover exercise notebooks. The initial thought was to possibly be a songwriter as one of my future endeavors. But alas! There was College, then Medical School, then Residency, then “real world” work, and as such the writing, which had continued over the years, never materialized to becoming actual songs. I had put the books away and only recently found the two volumes.

Impressively, some of these were deemed “ok” to the author, and of course, some not so much so, in his mind. Then the idea of converting some into poetry dawned.

The tomes reflect aspects of the author’s perspective. He explores different themes, from love, to heartbreak, to disappointments, fears, to exploring his favorite poetry forms among other themes. He is vulnerable, raw, and this is exactly what he wishes to convey to his readers in the few poems he has selected from his “catalogue” that he has been building over the years, for his first volume of Poetry.