Death Heist: Origins

He was told to leave it alone. He should have listened.A routine compliance audit. A folder path that shouldn't exist. Two words from a supervisor: leave it. Most people would have.When his sister vanishes from her apartment in Detroit, and threatening messages arrive before the police do, a contract systems auditor realises that someone with access to the city's entire surveillance network has been watching him. That the cameras on every street corner, every traffic sensor, every communications relay in the city feeds into a private network operated by one man, and that network has been used to shape Detroit from the inside out for fifteen years.What begins as a search for one person becomes something much larger: a conspiracy woven into the fabric of the city itself. Shell companies are quietly buying up residential neighbourhoods. A financial architecture designed to appear legitimate from every angle except the one nobody thought to inspect. A private intelligence firm operating in the space between corporate security and something that has no clean name.Working alongside a team of operatives who have their own reasons to care, a journalist who understands what the story means and what it costs, and a city that has no idea what's been done in its name, he follows the evidence deeper than he intended to go and discovers that the question of how far to follow it is one he will be living with for a very long time.Detroit is real. The surveillance is real. The corruption is the kind that doesn't announce itself. And the man who built it hasn't finished building.