Charlie Stone is a brilliant analyst for the CIA—young, 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 assessment—not only is there an ominous coup in the making, a power struggle that will make glasnost a thing of the past—but 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.
At once, Stone is plunged into a nightmare of violence and paranoia. Framed for brutal murder, Stone finds himself in a cat-and-mouse pursuit across the United States, Europe, and finally, the Soviet Union, which, for the first time in history, has been seized by an unnerving wave of terrorism. Within the Kremlin, a secret group that calls itself the Moscow Club—outraged by Moscow's loosening grip on world power—is laying groundwork for an ingenious, violent coup d'état, led by one rogue member of Gorbachev's Politburo, which will topple the Kremlin leadership from within—and change the world order forever.
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 has—if she is indeed alive. She alone may be the key not only to the identity of the one man who seeks the reins of power—but to a final, amazing mystery almost as old as the Soviet Union itself.
