John W. Taggart

The Protocol

Series

Four books. One protagonist. A signal buried in the architecture of history.

Techno-Archaeological Thriller  ·  Four Volumes

Explore the Series
Scroll

The Series

The Protocol Series follows Daniel Mercer — orbital analyst, reluctant investigator, and the only person in a position to recognize what the data is actually saying. Four books. A single unbroken thread. Each volume tightens the architecture until the truth is no longer deniable.

The Architecture

The Protocol Series is the first of three interconnected series. Read alone, it resolves completely. Read alongside The Directive Series and The Sequence Series, the full connected universe reveals itself — twelve books, three protagonists, one hidden design.


Protocol · Directive · Sequence

The Complete Series

Four Volumes

Available Now
The Recurrence Protocol
I

Book I of IV  ·  The Protocol Series

The Recurrence Protocol

The signal was never random. Neither was the silence.

When orbital analyst Daniel Mercer detects an anomaly in the precision timing systems monitoring asteroid Apophis, he assumes it's a calibration error. It isn't. The signal is coherent, patterned, and old — far older than anything that should exist in the data. Following the trail pulls Daniel out of the observatory and into a world where the wrong discovery gets people killed, and where the institutions built to protect knowledge are the most dangerous ones of all.

StatusPublished 2026
ISBN979-8-2507-4448-5
GenreTechno-Archaeological Thriller
Order on Amazon Learn More
II

Book II of IV

The Alignment Protocol

The signal has a source. Finding it means returning to the last place Daniel should go — and confronting the institution that built the silence around it.

Coming Soon
III

Book III of IV

The Origin Protocol

The architecture of the signal is older than recorded history. The question is no longer what it means — it's who built it, and whether they ever stopped transmitting.

Coming Soon
IV

Book IV of IV

The Terminal Protocol

The final volume. Every discovery, every loss, every thread Daniel has followed converges here. The last book in the connected universe to be published — for a reason.

Coming Soon

The People in the Signal

Characters

Daniel Mercer
Protagonist

Daniel Mercer

Orbital Analyst · NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Daniel Mercer is not a field man. He is precise, methodical, and most comfortable when the data is the only voice in the room. Forty-seven years old, tall with the lean build of someone who once ran seriously and kept the frame without always keeping the miles — his hair gone noticeably gray at the temples, his hands carrying the economy of someone who has spent decades working with instruments that punish imprecision. His back is an ongoing negotiation. He does not complain about things he cannot change.

He monitors near-Earth objects from a position that should insulate him from the messier side of discovery. It doesn't. What makes Daniel dangerous — to the people who want the signal buried — is that he is constitutionally incapable of accepting a pattern he cannot explain. He doesn't chase the truth. He follows it, step by careful step, until there is no alternative interpretation left.

ExpertiseOrbital mechanics, precision timing systems, near-Earth object monitoring
MethodEvidence-first. Never conjecture ahead of the data. Follows the anomaly wherever it leads, regardless of where that is.
WeaknessOperates alone by instinct. Trusts systems more than people — until the systems are the thing that's compromised.
ArcFour books. Each volume leaves him further from certainty and closer to the thing that cannot be unexplained.
Miriam Hale
Ally

Miriam Hale

Lead Archaeologist · Karahantepe Excavation

Forty-two years old. Dark olive complexion, nearly black eyes that make graduate students nervous in seminars — the look of someone evaluating what you're saying against a standard you weren't told about. A pale scar along her left forearm from a trench collapse at Çatalhöyük, which she mentions once to new field students as an example of why you shore the walls. She is the person who finds what Daniel's data is pointing toward — in stone, in earth, in the patient record of people who built things to last twelve thousand years.

ExpertiseNeolithic archaeology, excavation, symbolic analysis, megalithic sites
RoleTranslates the physical record. Grounds Daniel's data in the actual earth.
Claire Dolan
Ally

Claire Dolan

Investigative Journalist · Science & Infrastructure

Sharp, patient, and already awake when Daniel calls at three in the morning. Claire has been embedded in this story longer than anyone realizes. She pressed the routing identifier into Daniel's hand at Iqbal's memorial and has been keeping her personal phone charged and close ever since. She knows everyone in every coordination role that touches timing infrastructure. She knows how institutional silence works. She answers on the third ring because it would be suspicious to answer on the first.

ExpertiseInvestigative journalism, source networks, institutional exposure
RoleThe mechanism that makes the truth irreversible once it's found.
Marcus Trent
Ally

Marcus Trent

Geophysicist · University of Houston

Early forties, running a civilian atomic clock network from a third-floor lab at UH that smells of server heat and old coffee. Eighty-seven reference stations across three continents. Methodical, skeptical of conclusions that outrun data, constitutionally resistant to drama. He orders lunch without being asked, notes without turning from his screen that he wants it on record he was in the room when history was made, and is almost never wrong about the numbers. He is the infrastructure beneath the investigation — quiet, essential, unshakable.

ExpertiseAtomic clock networks, GPS timing, geophysical data analysis
RoleThe technical foundation. Without Marcus, there is no investigation.
Antagonist

Ethan Cole

Director · Planetary Defense Coordination Office

Daniel's graduate school friend. The better politician between them, even then — Ethan understood how to move through institutions without scraping against them, while Daniel understood how to push until something gave. They valued this about each other once. Now it is simply the shape of their disagreement. Late forties, almost unchanged from his graduate school years in the ways that matter: same deliberate movements, same tendency to scan a room before speaking, same controlled expression that gives nothing away. Age has added lines at the corners of his eyes and a restraint that wasn't there at twenty-two.

Ethan is not a simple villain. He believes that what he is doing is necessary — that some truths, released at the wrong time and in the wrong way, cause more harm than the silence around them. He is not wrong about everything. That is what makes him dangerous.

MotivationInstitutional preservation. The genuine belief that controlling disclosure is protection, not suppression.
RelationshipFormer friend. He knows Daniel will push. That's exactly why he's trying to contain him before it gets to that.
MethodLanguage. Framing. Institutional weight applied quietly, before anyone has to be obvious about it.
Ethan Cole

The Connected Universe

Three Series. Twelve Books.

The Protocol Series is the entry point. The Directive Series runs parallel — a different protagonist, a different angle on the same hidden architecture. The Sequence Series completes the triangle. Three characters who never meet. Three investigations that converge on the same truth.

Read any series alone and the story resolves. Read all three and the universe opens.

You are here

Protocol

Coming Soon

Directive

Coming Soon

Sequence

Full Series Roadmap →

Stay in the Signal