The Gordian Protocol

A MAN OF TWO WORLDS History professor Benjamin Schröder lives a happy life. He has a job he loves in a profession he adores. Then everything changes. A student’s dissertation on Operation Oz, the Pacific Allies’ invasion of Vladivostok, staged through occupied Japan to meet their Imperial German allies, sets off a psychotic episode in Schröder. It has to be psychotic, right? Schröder is flooded with memories of a different, ghastly world in which Operation Oz never happened. Memories of helpless civilians slaughtered in extermination camps. A world where the Chinese Communists succeeded. Where the Middle East became a festering sore of bloodshed and fanaticism. Worst of all—a world filled with thousands of nuclear warheads waiting to launch! Then a lunatic knocks on Schröder’s door. He’s a man with an impossible story about alternate realities, time travel, temporal knots, and a dozen doomed universes that must inevitably die. It’s all beginning to sound . . . true. And if it is, then Benjamin Schröder could be the one man who will decide which universe lives and which dies—including the universe that contains the woman he loves more than life itself.