M. Troy
Salisbury
THE FEATURED WORK
The Watershed Man
"Eleven people died in Paris. The French called it a gas leak. Reed Calder is going to find out what it actually was."
Reed Calder is the CIA’s most precise field officer. He is methodical, controlled, and constitutionally allergic to unmanaged surfaces and unnecessary human contact. He carries Purell everywhere. He wipes down tables before he sits. He has embossed business cards that he considers a biohazard.
When an analyst connects a series of classified international incidents to a logistics network running through an unremarkable small town in rural Virginia, Langley sends their best. The cover: Alan Mercer, independent environmental consultant, watershed survey. The town: Millhaven, Virginia. Population: just under seven thousand. One main street. A diner called Ruthie’s.
"You can’t control who walks through that door. But you can make sure there’s a seat for them when they do."
— Ruthie, proprietor, Ruthie’s Diner
In a city, Reed Calder is invisible. In Millhaven, everyone is a sensor. The diner owner seats him in the best tactical position in the restaurant before he can process what she’s done. The postal carrier’s twenty-minute monologue about raccoons contains, buried inside it, an intelligence lead. The town does not allow for the kind of controlled, contact-minimized existence Reed has spent fifteen years perfecting. And the operation does not allow for mistakes.
Somewhere in Millhaven, someone is staging production inventory for a weapon that has already been tested on civilians. Reed’s job is to find out who, without letting the town find out what he is.
The Watershed Man is a spy thriller about a man who has engineered every human connection out of his life — and what happens when a town of seven thousand refuses to let him get away with it.