"It is 1913, and those who follow the news closely can see the world is teetering on the brink of war. Jack McColl, a Scottish car salesman with an uncanny ear for languages, has always hoped to make a job for himself as a spy. As his sales calls take him from city to great city--Hong Kong to Shanghai to San Francisco to New York--he moonlights collecting intelligence for His Majesty's Navy, but British espionage is in its infancy and Jack has nothing...

The world's largest urban warfare training compound stands in the desert near Las Vegas. Forty British commandos are being hunted by and entire American battalion. But their commander has an ace up his sleeve, he plans to smuggle in ten CHERUB agents and fight the best war game ever.

"Autumn 1917: As a generation of Europe's young men perish on the Eastern and Western fronts, British spy Jack McColl is assigned a sabotage mission deep in the heart of Central Asia, where German influence is strong and where he'll be in completely unfamiliar territory. Despite his uncanny ear for foreign languages, there is much he doesn't know about the cities he's to infiltrate, or the people he's to meet there. As he quickly realizes, the mission...

In the fourth and final installment of David Downing's spy series, Jack McColl is sent to Soviet Russia, where the civil war is coming to an end. The Bolsheviks have won but the country is in ruins.

"Paris, in April of 1968. The cafés are alive with talk of revolution, but for Scottish-American Will Flemyng-- a spy working in the British Embassy-- the crisis is personal. A few words from a stranger on the Metro change his life. His family is threatened with ruin and he now faces the spy's oldest fear: exposure. Freddy Craven is the hero and mentor Flemyng would trust with his life, but when he is tempted into a dark, Cold War labyrinth, he chooses...

"London 1909: The British Empire spans the globe, seen as an invulnerable imperial power. But Captain Vernon Kell, head of counter-intelligence at the War Office, knows better. In Russia, there is revolution in the wind; in Germany, an arms race; and in London, the streets are alive with foreign agents provocateur. Kell wants to set up a Secret Service, an agency with a mandate to act domestically and abroad to protect the Empire, but to convince...

"In 1910 London, Captain Vernon Kell's fledgling secret intelligence service faces being shut down before it has even begun its job of saving the British Empire from German and Russian spies. Harassed by politicians like the ambitious Winston Churchill, bullied by Special Branch, undermined by his colleague's ill-advised foreign ventures, and alarmed at his wife's involvement with militant suffragettes, Kell is making no progress in tracking high-profile...