A few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, spook-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster reveals to young journalist Bill Cage that he'd once considered spying for the enemy.

More than two decades later, Cage receives an anonymous note hinting that he should have dug deeper.

The note is the first of many literary bread crumbs that soon lead him back to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest in search of the truth, even as the events of Lemaster's past eerily--and dangerously--begin intersecting with those of his own. As the suspense steadily increases, a long stalemate of secrecy may finally be broken.