Coming Soon · Espionage Thriller

The Last
WarheadA NOVEL

by Martin May

South Africa dismantled six nuclear weapons in 1989. The seventh was never on the books. Thirty-five years later, someone wants it.

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The Story

A weapon that was never supposed to exist

David Kessler is a forty-year-old South African investment banker with a settled life in Cape Town and no reason to look back. Then a former colleague is found dead, and David's name turns up in a file that should have been incinerated in 1990.

What follows is a hunt across three continents — Cape Town, London, Vienna — for a warhead nobody admits exists, by an enemy who knows David's old code names better than he does. To survive it, he will need help from an MI6 case officer who has her own reasons for staying off the books, and a young South African analyst who is the only person still tracking the file.

"The lockbox was real. The apartment was real. The cipher was real. Everything else, he could no longer be sure of."

A debut espionage thriller grounded in the real history of South Africa's nuclear programme, written by an author who knows the streets it walks down.

Three Doors

Read it. Sleep in it. Talk in it.

Most thrillers give you a book. This one gives you three ways in.

DOOR ONE

Read it

The novel — 360 pages, three acts, twenty-nine chapters. Available in paperback, hardback, and ebook at launch on Amazon worldwide. Pre-order signups open below.

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DOOR TWO

Sleep in it

The safe house in chapter five is a real Sea Point apartment. Same lockbox. Same Karen. Same sea-facing alcove. Stay there, walk David's route along the promenade, and read the chapter on the dining-room table where it happens.

Stay in the Safe House
DOOR THREE

Talk in it

The Hartley Cipher is the encryption system David, Emma and Thabo use to message each other off the grid. Try it. AES-256 secured, 11-digit key, no servers, no logs.

Open the Cipher
Door Two

The real safe house

Ocean View Drive, Sea Point. The apartment David and Emma run to in chapter five is a real, bookable Airbnb. Same building. Same view. Same Karen.

"Karen had left the keys in a tumbler-coded lockbox by the door. Inside, the apartment was cool and quiet, the white shutters pulled almost closed against the morning sun. From the dining-room alcove you could see all the way down the Atlantic to Robben Island."

— THE LAST WARHEAD, CHAPTER 5

View the Airbnb Listing

4.95★ Superhost · Apartment 9 · Sea Point, Cape Town

Door Three

The Hartley Cipher

In the book, three agents stay alive by sending each other messages no one can read. The same tool now lives on the web.

Type a message. Pick an 11-digit key. Press encrypt. Send the gibberish to anyone, anywhere — only the matching key unlocks it. Try it now:

jR8tk2hQ+w1mF/aN7yL3xV5pZc6oXbE9DkSeIuYr0PlMzWnTBgVqAhCxJfRdNvK4=
Open the Cipher →

AES-256-GCM · PBKDF2 · No servers · No logs · Open in any browser

The Author

Martin May

MM

South African. First novel.

Martin May was born and lives in South Africa. The Last Warhead is his debut novel — the product of a long fascination with the country's quiet 1989 decision to dismantle six nuclear weapons, and the question that has bothered him ever since: what if there had been a seventh?

He wrote much of the book in Cape Town, at the dining-room alcove described in chapter five. The apartment is real. So is the lockbox. So is Karen. The cipher works.

Edited and produced in association with Boutique Books, South Africa.

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