Brian Norquist is sixty, eminent and content. But when his grandson asks him, "Did you ever fight in a war, papa?" he decides that one's legacy should not be left to chance and sets out to write a memoir. After all, he's been a close observer and an occasional amateur spy in the war that didn't happen - the Cold War between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He finds the past to be a dangerous place. Memories morph into regrets. Motivations and even facts change shape when reexamined. His occasional side jobs for a mysterious CIA officer form a pattern, a Faustian pact that takes on a sinister clarity across the years. And, most unsettling of all, what he thought he knew about himself and those closest to him turns out to be horribly wrong. The memoir is fraught with real and present dangers for him and others. Norquist's reconstruction of his past weaves its way through Russian gulags, the cataclysmic failure of communism and the subsequent fall and rise of Soviet ambitions, and the most basic human emotions of love, vengeance and heroism as played out in the lives of a professor, a traitor and an assassin.