pIt's late winter, 2020, and Nick has been pulled out of the CIA's Kabul office and sent to Paris for what sounds like a simple assignment. Posing as a graduate student at a local polytechnical institute, his task is to build a case against Abdul Haqq, a brilliant engineering student suspected of building bombs for Hezbollah. What should be an open-and-shut case soon becomes a tangled mess as Nick finds himself drawn into a friendship with the charismatic young engineer, then falls hard for Abdul's adopted sister, the beautiful but troubled art student with a tragic past, Gabrielle. As tensions in his personal life rise against a distant backdrop of geopolitical conflicts in Russian-dominated parts of Ukraine, Nick soon finds himself struggling to balance his passion for Gabrielle and his friendship for Abdul with his growing sense that something is rotten at the highest levels of the American government. At the center of a hornet's nest of political malfeasance and unbridled greed is