Charlie Stone is a brilliant analyst for the CIAβyoung, wealthy, a maverick, an avid mountain climber. He has made an illustrious reputation for predicting the unpredictable ways of the Kremlin, even now, after the Cold War, when everything seems to have changed. He's summoned urgently to read the transcript of a tape recording smuggled out of the Soviet Union by one of the few remaining moles. His expert assessmentβnot only is there an ominous coup in the making, a power struggle that will make glasnost a thing of the pastβbut he senses that the conspiracy may well be linked to an old family mystery: why his father, a prominent Harvard historian, was imprisoned during the McCarthy era.
Suddenly, Stone's investigation becomes deeply personal. He finds himself delving into a conspiracy whose roots lie in the first days of the Cold War. Stone's search leads him to the private archives of his own godfather, the legendary Winthrop Lehman, a man who was the confidant of FDR and Truman, and once, secretly, the confidant to Lenin himself.
As the days, and finally hours, tick by, Stone must elude his pursuers long enough to find an elusive woman who holds a power she does not know she hasβif she is indeed alive. She alone may be the key not only to the identity of the one man who seeks the reins of powerβbut to a final, amazing mystery almost as old as the Soviet Union itself.
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