CIA analyst Grant Kale — recently divorced, seventeen years at a desk in service to his country — is approached on a bench near the Reflecting Pool by a man who already knows his name. The recruitment is patient. The pressure is professional. The handler is named Orlov, and he has spent over forty years in Russian intelligence learning how to make men say yes.
Orlov has watched Kale long enough to know how to turn him. But as the months turn — March to May to August to December — Orlov begins to understand what it costs to watch a man refuse to break, and what refusing has always been worth.
Across the building, counterintelligence officer Nadia Vasquez notices something in a hallway that most people would have let pass. She doesn’t let it pass. What she builds in the months that follow will outlast every man in this story, including the one she’s trying to save.
A literary spy novel about refusal, recognition, and the long, quiet patience of betrayal — for readers of David McCloskey, Paul Vidich, Mick Herron, and the patient tradition of John le Carré.
