Karl Beck is a former KGB officer who defected to America at the end of the Cold War and was resettled with his new name as a Slavic Literature professor at Indiana University. Beck is sixty, but tall, athletic and a charming man of the world. He is falling in love with Cathleen; an attractive woman half his age of the History department, whose mother and grandfather had been part of the underground IRA of Northern Ireland. He eventually reveals his true past to her and also that in the last few years, he has become involved with a secret, private espionage group. While doing academic...

Washington-based consultant Gerry Doyle is now a very wealthy elderly American with the interesting past of having started out his working life at the CIA during the Cold War era. When that first career unexpectedly faltered, he moved on to the lucrative world of international consulting and accumulated great wealth, as well as some enemies, over the subsequent decades. An old agency colleague from their days together in Moscow reveals to Doyle upon his deathbed that the reason Doyle's career had stalled in the late 1980s was because circumstantial evidence pointed at Doyle as being a mole...