When the world is turned upside down, who can you trust? Cambridge, England - a professor with links to Iran's nuclear programme is found dead on a park bench, a victim of poisoning by persons unknown. At the same time, in New York, USA, a leading cardiologist is killed in an apparent hit-and-run. And in Hamburg, Germany, a successful academic publisher is shot dead on a backstreet. What links the deaths is that the victims were all prominent Iranian émigrés, and members of the Tehran Committee, an underground dissident movement. British Secret Intelligence Service agent Sebastian Friend is tasked by 'C' to seek out who was responsible for these murders, a mission which at first seems deceptively simple. But as with so many things in the shadowy world of espionage, all is not what it seems. Friend finds himself in a battle for survival as he follows the trail from London to Tehran and back, untangling a complex web which could throw the entire established world order on its head.