May 1984. Marshal Tito, authoritarian president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, has been dead for four years. During his time in power, his iron fist, at times velvet gloved, kept the state from disintegrating, but now the stability of the nation is at risk …
What secret plan is about to unfold in the mountains of Yugoslavia?
A Yugoslav military attaché has defected in Ottawa. Before the Canadians can interrogate him, he is assassinated.
In Trieste, Italy, someone is eliminating NATO agents. Michael Higgins, their case officer, is warned by a Canadian spy, Fae Avadek, that he has a traitor in his network. Suddenly, Higgins is running for his life, framed for the murder of one of his contacts. Pursued by an unknown enemy, he falls in love with Fae, whose violent past figures in their search for answers.
Vitali Alferyev, KGB station chief in Belgrade, has been recalled to Moscow, where his superior orders him to withdraw all covert operatives from the sector between Rijeka and Ljubljana. Alferyev’s search for the reason leads him into a deadly conflict with a GRU agent operating in the area.
In the Yugoslav mountains, where Croatian terrorists, KGB spies, and NATO agents play out the final violent moves in a dangerous game to change the fate of Europe, Higgins and Avadek must sift through layers of deceit and treachery in their attempt to thwart an enemy whose tentacles stretch from the East to the West, from the past to the (novel’s) present.