John W. Taggart
Series
She followed the money to the bottom of the world. What she found was never meant to be found at all.
Explore the SeriesThe Series
The Directive Series follows Aimee Mercer — Pulitzer-winning journalist, defense budget specialist, and the woman who finds an anomaly that shouldn't exist. Four books. A single thread from a line in a spreadsheet to a tower built on something no one in the room understands. She exposes the largest environmental cover-up in history without ever learning what she was really standing over.
The Architecture
The Directive Series runs parallel to The Protocol Series and The Sequence Series. Three investigations. Three protagonists who never meet. The reader holds all three simultaneously and watches each character approach the same truth from a completely different angle — and never quite reach it.
Protocol · Directive · Sequence
The Complete Series
Book I of IV · The Directive Series
The budget anomaly was a rounding error. Until it wasn't.
Aimee Mercer has spent fifteen years following government money to places it wasn't supposed to go. A three-hundred-million-dollar defense line item coded to an Antarctic research station nobody can find leads her from a Senate subcommittee hearing to the ice shelf — and to a structure that doesn't appear on any satellite image taken after 2019. The cover-up is real. The people maintaining it are serious. What the tower was built to do is the question Aimee never quite reaches the bottom of.
Book II of IV
The anomaly has a pattern. The pattern has a source. Aimee follows it to Alaska and finds that the installation there was never really about the ionosphere.
Coming 2028Book III of IV
The historical record has been edited. Not recently. Aimee finds the earliest version — and the name that appears in every document before the redaction.
Coming 2029Book IV of IV
The final volume. Aimee has the story. Publishing it is the problem. The people who built the cover-up were not trying to hide something shameful. They were trying to prevent something worse.
Coming 2030The Protagonist
Investigative Journalist · Pulitzer Prize, 2021
Aimee Mercer is the best defense budget journalist in the country, which is a specialty so narrow that most people have never heard of it. She won her Pulitzer for a series on procurement fraud that sent three contractors to prison and closed a program that had been running for eleven years. She is forty-one years old, works out of a sublet in Savannah, and does not own a television. She follows money. She has always followed money. The Wardenclyffe budget line is the strangest thing she has ever found — because the money is real, the station exists, and no one who should know about it does.
The Connected Universe
The Directive Series launches in November 2027 — after three Protocol books and two Sequence books are in print. By then, the reader already knows what the Antarctic tower was built on. Aimee never will. That's the point.
Read the Directive Series alone and the investigation resolves completely. Read it alongside The Protocol Series and The Sequence Series and the full architecture of the universe becomes visible.
Start Here
Protocol
You are here
Directive
Coming Soon
Sequence