Sam McCready serves Britain as Chief of Covert Operations for the Secret Intelligence Service. He's competent, dedicated, in his prime. Why then this push to get him out? The options are painful — early retirement or an administrative backwater. But he has one other option: it's a wild card, confrontational, risky. Risky because McCready knows too much. He senses the move is more about destabilizing SIS than settling a score with him. Who wants him out, and why? And what happens if he refuses to go quietly?

As an intrepid and inventive field agent, McCready's independent style has often driven him beyond the rules. He has not been afraid to press the CIA to the explosion point — or to play cat-and-mouse with the KGB. He has successfully tricked Qaddafi and the IRA and once even set himself up as governor of a remote Caribbean island torn between Fidel Castor and the Colombian drug trade. But times have changed and mavericks like McCready are an endangered species. Now, before a panel of his peers, McCready must defend his unorthodox exploits or face dismissal. What hangs in the balance is not only his own career, but the very future of British intelligence.