Countdown to Death — Bryan Cassiday

Haunted by self-loathing, Ethan Carr quits the Los Angeles Police Department after he accidentally shoots to death an innocent boy on one of his assignments. Years later, he sets up shop as a private investigator and is hired by Richard Herbert to protect him from being assassinated for twenty-four hours until he meets his son. Herbert is on the lam from his employer US Cyber Command at the National Security Agency campus in Fort Meade, Maryland.

He tells Carr he wants to reveal top secret intel to the media about a computer program Cybercom has invented that can infect and disable permanently any computer in the world. He is convinced the Equation Group, a shadowy arm of the NSA, is going to have him killed before he can reveal his intel to the media.

Carr is reluctant to take on Herbert as a client, believing the US government might consider Herbert a traitor for publicizing top secret national security information. Carr decides to take the case because he doesn't believe the government has the right to assassinate its own citizens on American soil, which Herbert claims that they are about to do to him and that they have done to others.

Carr's battle to keep himself and Herbert alive in a web of lies, cabals, and assassination plots that emanate from the highest seats of power becomes a battle for his tortured conscience, which is not only consumed with guilt from his erstwhile job but racked by qualms about his decision to protect Herbert, who could be a traitor to his country.