British intelligence operative Peter Ashton returns from an out-of-the-country assignment to discover the office in an uproar. An SIS safehouse in Yorkshire has been the site of incredible carnage - three agents have been savagely murdered and another one is missing, as is the man they were guarding. Equally upsetting for Ashton is that it was his own wife who discovered the bodies and "cleaned" the safehouse before notifying the authorities. Now it seems likely that she could be the next one on someone's private hit list. Ashton joins the search for the killers and must sort through a confusing series of leads: one leading to Cuban gangsters, another to Islamic terrorists, and one leading straight to his old nemesis, Russian intelligence chief Pavel Treliser.