A Novel by Patrick Seaman
A DEA agent walks his team into a trap that should not exist. A geneticist finishes the work of her life without knowing what she has actually built. Between them lies a conspiracy that does not behave like crime. It behaves like statecraft, and it has decided they are both expendable.
■ Coming 2026 ■ Milstar Books
The bioterrorism in Seed of Fear is not speculative. The delivery mechanism, engineered through commercial agriculture and invisible at every point of inspection, is grounded in real science. The fiction is that someone has already done it.
The U.S. food supply is the largest unmonitored delivery system in the world. Hundreds of millions of people consume the same commodity crops every day. For a state actor willing to think in decades, it is not a vulnerability. It is a feature.
Advances in plant viral vectors and gene drive technology have outpaced the regulatory frameworks designed to contain them. A sufficiently sophisticated research program, properly concealed behind legitimate agricultural development, is undetectable until deployment.
The most dangerous operations do not begin with a weapon. They begin with a scientist, a curriculum, and a talent identified early and quietly pointed in a single direction. Patience measured in decades does not look like an attack. It looks like a career. By the time anyone asks the right question, the work is already finished.
The man who was never meant to die, only to fall.
Alec McCreary is not a cowboy. He is not reckless. He is a careful, loyal agent who spent a decade building a career on competence and political neutrality, and never knew that both were being used against him. When the operation he led on the South Texas border became a massacre, the agency called it a tragedy. What Alec could not know was that the operation had been engineered from the start: the raid designed not to kill him, but to erase him. His task force was selected precisely because his reputation would guarantee media trust, and his connection to Grace Liang would give the people behind the operation something more useful than a body. A lever.
What they miscalculated is the thing they noted in their own file: Alec McCreary cannot disengage from perceived responsibility. He will not disappear psychologically even when erased legally. His tragedy is structural, a man of high integrity destroyed by a system that valued his integrity only as a tool, and his refusal to accept that is the only weapon he has left.
"He was competent in a system that did not value competence. He loved someone who was never allowed to belong to herself. He survived because survival was more useful than death."
The unwitting architect of a weapon she never knew she built.
Grace Liang is not naive. She is not submissive. She is one of the most gifted molecular geneticists of her generation, and she has been pointed in a direction since she was a child. Guided through her education by intermediaries she believed were mentors, placed at a controlled-environment research facility through channels she never questioned, Grace spent four years designing the genome editing workflow, the growth chamber architecture, and the metabolic acceleration protocols of what she was told was a humanitarian crop: a grain engineered to thrive in poisoned soil and feed the hungriest corners of the earth. She believed she was saving lives. She had no idea what she was actually building, or who had been steering her toward it.
When the work is finished and the ground shifts beneath her, Grace begins to understand that every choice she thought she made was a choice someone else made for her, by people she trusted, inside a design years in the making. Her rebellion, when it comes, will be intellectual first, emotional second, and violent last, because Grace Liang does not break. She calculates.
"She is a constructed mind awakening inside a machine built to use her."
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Patrick Seaman is a technology entrepreneur, publisher, and author based in Fort Worth, Texas. He was the first employee at AudioNet / Broadcast.com, which was acquired by Yahoo for $5.7 billion and became the foundation of the modern streaming industry. His nonfiction account of that era, Streaming Wars, won the 2025 Best Indie Book Award for Nonfiction.
Seed of Fear is his first solo thriller, written over several years of research into agricultural biotechnology, cartel logistics, and the intersection of intelligence operations with commercial science. It is the first book in a planned series. Patrick is also the co-author of the Accipiter War military science fiction series, written with his son Blake.
He publishes under Milstar Books.
