No one knows better than Matthew Furniss the dangers of espionage in the Middle East. For two decades, spanning the Shah’s rule and the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, when has run the British agents in Iran. The Islamic Revolution and its aftermath decimated his network of agents and destroyed many of his closest friends. Charlie Eshraq, the son of one of those friends, has joined the exile community in London, where he is treated by Furniss as an adopted son.
Eshraq nurses a fierce obsession for vengeance against those responsible for the shooting of his father and the public execution of his sister. That obsession has driven him to hunt down the judges and executioners who destroyed his family, and he travels repeatedly into Iran to kill them. Each time he returns from Iran he hands to Furniss the vital raw intelligence that he has collected.
Eshraq’s journeys lead him into an even more perilous game. He needs money for sophisticated weapons and this, unbeknownst to Furniss, he raises by bringing back to Britain pure heroin from the Iranian poppy fields......