The germ of the story begins in West Berlin in 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses, rare havens for field agents and case officers amidst the dangerous milieu of a city in the grips of the Cold War. But during her routine inspection of an agency property, she overhears a meeting between two people speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities and then, before much longer, she witnesses a second unauthorized encounter, one that will place her in the sightlines of the most ruthless and powerful man in the CIA. Her attempts to expose the crimes she has witnessed will bring about repercussions that reach across decades into the present day, when, in a farm town in Maryland, a young man is arrested for the double murder of his parents, and his sister takes it upon herself to find out why he did it. -- Provided by publisher.