When the wife of a CIA cryptanalyst is murdered in a terrorist attack and his superiors rule out going after the culprits, he decides to blackmail them into training him and sending him across the Czech border so he can do it himself. No sooner is he across than he finds himself being hunted by the Russians and the CIA. It's a very eighties cynical-about-the-Cold-War thriller, though some of his others are a LOT darker. Still, there are the usual twists and turns and betrayals, though I can't decide if it was clever or climsy for a character to remark, reeling off various methods of assasination, that you could scare someone to death with an x-ray machine, which our protagonist later proceeds to do. The protagonist himself is oddly unlikeable, even in his grief, and I'm almost certain it's intentional. There's a new film adaptation coming, and I'm curious as to how they'll update it.