On a chilly early morning walk on the wooded outskirts of Berlin, Emil Grimm finds the body of his neighbor, a fellow Stasi officer named Lothar, with a gunshot wound to the temple and a pistol in his right hand. Despite appearances, Emil suspects murder. A few months earlier he would have known just what to do, but now, as East Germany disintegrates, being a Stasi colonel is more of a liability than an asset. More troubling still is that Emil and Lothar were involved in a final clandestine mission, one that has clearly turned deadly. Now Emil must finish the job alone, on uncertain ground where old alliances seem to be shifting by the day.

When CIA agent Claire Saylor is told that she’ll be going undercover in Hamburg to pose as the wife of an academic who has published a controversial interpretation of the Quran’s promise to martyrs, she assumes the job is a punishment for past unorthodox behavior. But when she discovers her team leader is Paul Bridger, another Agency maverick, she realizes there may be more to this mission than meets the eye --- and not just for professional reasons. Meanwhile, across town in Hamburg, Mahmoud, a recent Moroccan émigré, begins to fall under the sway of a group of radicals at his local mosque. The deeper he’s drawn into the group, the greater the danger he faces, and he is soon torn between his obligations to them and his feelings toward a beautiful westernized Muslim woman.

West Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses. Her world is upended when, during her routine inspection of an agency property, she overhears a meeting between two agents speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities far beyond her comprehension. Before the day is out, she witnesses a second unauthorized encounter, one that will place her firmly in the sights of one of the most ruthless and powerful men at the agency. Her attempts to expose the truth about what she has seen will create repercussions that reach across decades and continents into the present day, when two people are gruesomely murdered. Now Helen's daughter, Anna, aided by a jaded Washington fixer, must chase down what is buried in her mother's past and face the chilling fact that old secrets never die.

When Woodrow Cain leaves North Carolina for New York City, he also leaves behind a wife who had left him, a daughter in the care of his sister, and a career as a police officer marred by questions surrounding his partner’s murder. He gets a job with the NYPD --- hoping to start anew --- but comes into contact with a man who calls himself Danzinger. He speaks five languages and has the appearance of a “crackpot,” yet he is the only person who can help Cain identity a body just found floating in the Hudson. Who is this mysterious man, and how does he know so much about Cain? The more Cain and Danzinger investigate, the nearer they come to the center of a citywide web of traitorous corruption from which neither of them may get out alive.

Darwin Cole, ex-F-16 fighter pilot, is a washout --- drunk and alone, and haunted by what he saw on the display of the drone he "piloted." He teams up with three journalists investigating the identity of the anonymous --- and possibly rogue --- intelligence operative who directed Cole's drone mission. But in a surveillance culture, even the well-intentioned are in danger, especially when they're tracking leads to the very heart of that culture --- in intelligence, in the military, and among the unchecked private contractors who stand to profit richly from the advancing technology…technology not just for use "over there," but for right here, right now.

A few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, spook-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster revealed to up-and-coming journalist Bill Cage that he’d once considered spying for the enemy. For Cage, the news story created a brief but embarrassing sensation and heralded the beginning of the end of his career in journalism. More than two decades later, Cage receives an anonymous note hinting that he should have dug deeper into Lemaster’s pronouncement.