Beirut

Some secrets are carried in words. Others hide in the signal.

Tom Calder has returned from Cyprus expecting ordinary life to resume: RAF Sealand, rugby at the weekend, and the quiet certainty of a job he understands.

Then the telephone rings.

A discreet offer places him on a civilian communications assignment in the Eastern Mediterranean. The contract looks routine. The work is anything but.

Operating satellite communications linked to British interests in Lebanon, Tom's instructions are simple: maintain the equipment, keep the traffic moving, and never ask what the messages mean. He is not an intelligence officer. He is not a negotiator. He is a technician - and the less he knows, the safer everyone should be.

But signals have patterns.

From a rooftop satellite terminal, Tom begins noticing fragments buried within the ordinary flow of calls and telex traffic. Names. Priorities. Delays. Silences. Individually they mean almost nothing. Together, they suggest something he was never supposed to see.

And in a world of hostages, intelligence operations and carefully guarded channels, simply witnessing the wrong thing can be dangerous.

Tom must decide where professional duty ends and personal responsibility begins - knowing that once a signal has been received, it cannot simply be unheard.

BEIRUT is Book Two of the Holding the Signal series, following Tom Calder deeper into the hidden conflicts of the late twentieth century, where history is unfolding around him and his greatest weapon is not a gun, but his ability to listen, observe and understand.

One witness. Many secrets. No turning back.