Call the Ambassador

A series of changes is coming for Oleg Konstantinovich Ermilov, a Russian FSB colonel. The reason is the journalist Olesya Merkulova who suddenly appears on the horizon. She has just returned from a business trip to the USA, where her longtime acquaintance, the American journalist Michael Moran, contacted her. He suggested that Olesya publish a joint report about a certain Alexander Petrov—an ex-citizen of the USSR who, in the Soviet Union, received time under the articles “espionage” and “treason,” then safely emigrated to the USA, and is now serving a sentence in one of Seattle’s federal prisons. Moran proposes filming a movie about Alexander Petrov in Russian and English. For his part, he is ready to arrange a meeting with the prisoner in jail, while Olesya needs to gather as much information about Petrov in Russia as possible. Realizing that interest in Petrov’s person decades later is unlikely to have arisen out of nothing, Colonel Ermilov receives an order to review his case—investigated by counterintelligence many years ago. That’s how Ermilov ends up at the epicenter of a whirlpool of coincidences—ones that, in fact, are quite logical and consistent—something the colonel discovers as he moves step by step through an investigation that turns into more than just checking old materials.