Charles M. Wayne is the author of the Watchtower Series, a collection of contemporary espionage thrillers where intelligence, technology, and counterintelligence collide.

Wayne's career as a Wall Street executive and entrepreneur gave him a front-row seat to one of the greatest technological transformations of the modern era. Over five decades, he watched finance evolve from relationship-driven partnerships into markets dominated by massive computing power, sophisticated algorithms, and black-box models understood by only a handful of experts. He saw a similar transformation reshape national security. Intelligence agencies once dependent on codebreakers, surveillance teams, and field operatives now rely on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cyber operations, and data measured on an almost unimaginable scale.

Those experiences inspired the Watchtower Series.

At its center is Team Watchtower, an elite U.S. Army counterintelligence unit led by Major Will Morgan. Morgan believes, "Better to have a diamond with a flaw than a stone without." Rather than searching for perfect people, he builds exceptional teams by placing individuals where their strengths overwhelm their weaknesses.

Known throughout the Army Counterintelligence Command as "Morgan's Mustangs," the team reflects that philosophy. Its members represent ten nationalities, speak more than a dozen languages, and bring together remarkably different backgrounds: a former dumpster baby, an Asperger's pattern-recognition savant, a Ukrainian interrogator with a deep distrust of Russia, a Cantonese cyber specialist, a thirty-year surveillance veteran who serves as the team's den mother, an irreverent gay deputy, and other unconventional specialists whose talents make them indispensable.

They are not show ponies. They are sure-footed mustangs.

In Team Watchtower, performance is the only prerequisite for belonging. Together they form an unlikely "found family" charged with protecting America's most closely guarded secrets from spies, traitors, cyberattacks, and emerging technologies that threaten to change the balance of power.