Some secrets were never meant to be found
Some secrets are hidden in classified files. Others are buried beneath cities, civilizations, and entire versions of history.
The Midas Files is a science-fiction thriller series about impossible technology, government conspiracies, ancient powers, and the people caught between them. The story begins with the murder of a brilliant scientist and the disappearance of his greatest invention. From there, the mystery expands across decades and continents—and eventually beyond Earth itself.
At the center of the series is Hank Raglan, a young materials engineer whose career brings him into the unfinished work of Dr. Lawrence Bingham. Hank initially believes he is helping develop a revolutionary new technology. Instead, he becomes part of a secret struggle involving powerful corporations, organized crime, covert government programs, unexplained aerial phenomena, and forces whose influence reaches back to the beginnings of civilization.
What starts as one Pittsburgh murder case gradually opens into something much larger: a hidden history of humanity and a conflict over who will control the machinery behind it.
The People Caught in the Machinery
The story of The Midas Files is driven by a group of people connected by friendship, family, loss, and the consequences of the Gold Box.
Hank Raglan is a talented materials engineer recruited into the upper ranks of Unalco, a Pittsburgh-based technology company led by the charismatic Tony Laporte. As Hank becomes involved in Lawrence Bingham’s unfinished research, professional opportunity gives way to obsession and danger. His attempt to understand the Gold Box ultimately takes him into a world of secret operations, hidden wars, and impossible choices.
Caroline Friday is Hank’s childhood friend and the person least willing to accept the official explanations surrounding him. In The Midas Protocol, her work with an Innocence Institute leads her to reopen the murders of Lawrence and Eva Bingham. Ten years later, in Call of the Minotaur, Caroline has become an investigative journalist—but she remains haunted by Hank’s disappearance. When new evidence emerges, she once again follows the story everyone else has tried to bury.
Jack Barons becomes entangled in the conspiracy through a dangerous investigation of his own. Independent, resourceful, and unwilling to be intimidated, Jack discovers that the people protecting the Gold Box will use political influence, violence, and deception to preserve their control. His choices—and the enemies he makes—continue to shape the series through his son, Ben.
Addison Moore is Hank’s fiancée and a link to the ordinary future he once imagined for himself. As Hank is drawn deeper into Unalco’s secrets, Addison experiences the human cost of a mystery that begins consuming his life. Her relationship with Hank gives the conspiracy personal stakes long before its true scale becomes clear.
Ben Barons enters the larger mystery a decade later. What begins as curiosity draws him toward a world far older than Pittsburgh, Iraq, or modern civilization. Ben’s disappearance becomes one of the central threads of Call of the Minotaur, carrying the story into a lost kingdom filled with ancient power, impossible machines, and the shadow of the Minotaur.
Mortimer Vanterpool is an enigmatic and dangerous figure whose plans reach across buried histories and hidden conflicts. He understands that the Gold Box is more than an extraordinary scientific achievement, and his final design threatens Hank, Caroline, Ben, and far more than any of them initially realize.
Oberon operates at the edges of the known conspiracy. He possesses knowledge of the Gold Box, its origins, and the larger forces surrounding it, but his full purpose is not easily understood. Like many figures in The Midas Files, Oberon may offer answers—but never without raising more questions.
Around them is a larger cast of scientists, executives, journalists, soldiers, investigators, operatives, criminals, and beings whose histories challenge every assumption about humanity’s place in the Universe.
The Invention That Changed Everything
The central mystery of the series is the Gold Box, a quantum device created by Dr. Lawrence Bingham during his work for Unalco.
Bingham and his wife are murdered in 1983, and the Gold Box disappears. Years later, Hank Raglan is drawn into an effort to reconstruct the dead scientist’s work. What Hank does not initially understand is that Bingham’s invention has already attracted the attention of powerful people—and that some of them have been waiting years for someone capable of completing it.
The Gold Box represents a scientific breakthrough with the potential to transform matter, power, and the balance between nations. But its deeper capabilities extend beyond conventional science. It is simultaneously a secret, a weapon, a doorway, and a curse.
As the series progresses, the Gold Box becomes the key to a much larger hidden world. Its technology is connected to strange materials, unexplained craft, ancient machines, concealed installations, and the Axiom—a system whose nature and reach suggest that the laws governing human existence are neither as simple nor as secure as they appear.
The Box was never the conclusion of Lawrence Bingham’s work. It was an opening.
From Pittsburgh to the Far Side of the Moon
The Midas Files begins in Pittsburgh, where Lawrence Bingham conducts his research, Unalco builds its power, and Hank and Caroline grow up together. The city remains the emotional center of the series: a recognizable world of neighborhoods, universities, restaurants, old money, industrial ambition, and personal history.
From Pittsburgh, the conspiracy reaches into New York City, where the consequences of September 11 become intertwined with the continuing search for Hank and the forces surrounding the Gold Box.
The trail also leads to Iraq, where modern warfare unfolds above secrets buried beneath Baghdad. Tunnels, archaeological remnants, covert missions, and ancient histories converge as Hank and Caroline approach the truth from different directions.
Behind these modern locations stands ancient Mesopotamia, where the boundaries between recorded history, mythology, and suppressed memory begin to collapse. The oldest stories may contain traces of real places, real conflicts, and powers humanity no longer remembers correctly.
The mystery eventually extends to the Moon, where hidden operations and impossible discoveries reveal that the struggle over the Gold Box was never confined to Earth.
A Mystery Spanning Decades—and Millennia
The modern chronology begins in 1983 with the murders of Lawrence and Eva Bingham.
The Midas Protocol follows Hank, Caroline, Jack, Addison, and the people surrounding Unalco as the consequences of those murders resurface during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hank’s involvement with the Gold Box sets the larger story in motion and ultimately leads to his disappearance.
Call of the Minotaur moves the story forward approximately ten years into the early 2000s. The world has changed, the original conspiracy has had time to deepen, and the people left behind have tried to rebuild their lives. Yet the Gold Box and the forces connected to it have not gone away.
Behind that modern timeline lies a far older story—one extending into ancient civilizations, forgotten kingdoms, and events that may have shaped humanity without ever becoming part of its accepted history.
The Fight for More Than a Machine
At first, the stakes appear to involve ownership of a revolutionary invention. Whoever controls the Gold Box could possess technology capable of reshaping global wealth, military power, and political influence.
But the true stakes are much greater.
The Gold Box is connected to forces capable of opening pathways that were meant to remain closed. Mortimer Vanterpool’s plans threaten to turn that power toward his own design, while corporations, government programs, and other secretive factions pursue competing agendas. Every discovery draws Hank, Caroline, Jack, Addison, Ben, and their allies closer to a conflict whose consequences could reach across the world—and into the underlying structure of reality.
Despite its cosmic scale, The Midas Files remains a story about people. It is about the promises friends make to one another, the families caught in the wake of powerful men, and the cost of refusing to abandon someone the world has already declared lost.
Hank is trying to survive long enough to find a way home. Caroline is determined to uncover what happened to him. Ben must discover why he has been pulled into a mystery older than civilization. Around them, allies and enemies struggle to control a technology no one fully understands.
The deeper they travel into the mystery, the clearer the danger becomes:
The Gold Box did not simply reveal a hidden world.
It gave that world a way in.
Where the Journey Begins
The series begins with The Midas Protocol: Midas Files Book One, the story of the Bingham murders, the creation of the Gold Box, and Hank Raglan’s first journey into the conspiracy.
The story continues in Call of the Minotaur: Midas Files Book Two, available as a Complete Edition or in separate Part I and Part II editions. Readers choosing the two-part edition should begin with Call of the Minotaur – Part I.
