At 3:17 a.m., a man puts a battered laptop on his seven-year-old son's desk, next to a half-built Lego set, and walks out of the family's life without a word.
That is the first page of Codename: Lib3rty, Book One of the OBISEC cyber thriller trilogy. It is also the question the whole book asks: what if the thing that made you who you are was never really yours?
A boy, a laptop and a tower block
Thirteen years later, Zach Reeves is twenty and living in a Croydon council tower block. His mother works twelve-hour nursing shifts, so most nights he is alone with the laptop and everything it taught him. He is brilliant, isolated and angry in a way he cannot explain.
Then, probing a government server, he stumbles onto a misfiled classified directory. Inside is Project Meridian, a secret programme to watch every financial transaction in Britain. It is not planned. It is already running, hidden inside upgrades that compliance teams approved without a second look.
Four strangers, one problem
Zach cannot take on a shadow agency alone, so he posts a carefully worded message on an encrypted forum. Three people answer.
Lily is a data science student carrying the weight of her parents' sacrifices. Jane taught herself to hack at thirteen by breaking into her own social services file, and has never stayed anywhere long enough to call it home. Steve was raised on tradecraft and discipline by a father who once worked in intelligence.
Under their aliases, they become a team with a division of labour: Steve secures the communications, Lily reads the data, Jane runs the social engineering, and Zach leads the technical attack. None of them has met the others in person.
Built on real tradecraft
I have spent 40 years in cyber security, and the book shows it. Operational security, compartmentalised communications, social engineering, misconfigured permissions: the tools my characters use are the ones I have seen used, and the mistakes they make are the ones real teams make.
That matters because the best thrillers feel plausible. If the method is believable, the stakes feel real. The story is fiction, but nothing in the technique is wishful thinking.
What the book is really about
Underneath the chase is a quieter set of questions. How much of our lives can be measured without our consent? Who decides what counts as safe? And when you discover you have been watched, can you ever be sure your choices were your own?
It is also about people. Four young adults with very different lives learn to trust each other when trust is the one thing the system is built to destroy.
I will not spoil what happens when the team goes public, except to say that winning is not the same as being safe.
Read it
Codename: Lib3rty runs to about 90,000 words and is available in softcover and ebook. It is the first of three books, followed by Project: Sh@d0ws and Protocol: Z3r0.
If you are curious how a credible cyber thriller works, I have also written a free 62-page Cyber Thriller Field Guide, with a bonus chapter for readers of the trilogy.
• The book: obipixel.com/books/codename-lib3rty
• The free field guide: obipixel.com/books/field-guide
Dimitrios Zacharopoulos is the author of the OBISEC trilogy and has worked in cyber security for 40 years.
