Michael Havelock, is an intelligence agent in the United States. At the beginning of the novel he believes he has just witnessed the execution of his partner and the love of his life, Jenna Karas (anglicized version of Jenna Karasova) along an isolated stretch of the Costa Brava. Jenna had been marked for execution because she had been proved to be a KGB double agent.

He immediately leaves the intelligence world, something he'd been considering doing for some time and goes sightseeing in areas he'd previously visited. In Athens, Pyotr Rostov, a senior director of the KGB forces a meeting with Havelock. Rostov denies that Karas is an agent of theirs. Later, in Rome, Havelock sees Jenna alive at a train station. She flees him, frightened, and he pursues her.

Michael Havelock's world ended on a moonlit beach on the Costa Brava. He stud by and watched as his partner and lover, Jenna Karas, double agent, was coldly and efficiently gunned down by his own agency.

There's nothing left for Havelock but to get out, quit the game. Until, in one frantic moment on a crowded railway platform in Rome, Havelock sees Jenna. She's alive - and suddenly Havelock is a marked man, on the run from both US and Russian assassins.