It’s hard to find two things more incompatible than love and war, yet a meeting between the British publisher Barley Blair and a Russian woman, Katya Orlova, took place precisely on the `front line` of the cold war. Against their will, they were drawn into a game of the secret services of leading powers—one that unfolded around the manuscript of a famous Soviet scientist, whose content could explode the fragile balance of the world. John le Carré, formerly a career officer of British intelligence and today one of the world’s most fashionable writers, masterfully analyzes the inner conflict raging in the soul of a person forced to choose between patriotic duty and passion.