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. For Cage, a fan who grew up as a Foreign Service brat in the very cities where Lemaster set his plots, the story creates a brief but embarassing sensation. More than two decades later, Cage, by then a lonely, disillusioned PR man, 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 fo the truth, even as the events of Lemaster's past errily - and dangerously - begin intersecting with those of his own.