In the fourth title of Anthony Price's gripping spy series, British Intelligence officer David Audley slips away to Italy without authorisation, taking his wife with him. Immediately the suspicion arises that he may have defected, and the head of Italian security also becomes interested in his arrival, particularly as it has flushed from cover a rogue communist. But Audley has his own reasons for leaving Britain, in an investigation that becomes a matter of life or death.

In the rural peace of modern England, a war game recreates the slaughter of the Civil War. But when the battle ends, a real corpse is left it the Swine Brook; and an aristocratic but impoverished revolutionary claims to have found a cache of "Cromwell's Gold".When David Audley is called in, 17th-century secrets and the deadly game of modern espionage clash in a brilliantly intricate thriller of bluff and counterbluff.

A few weeks after D-Day, the German army in the West is retreating, with the British and the Americans in hot pursuit. But Major O'Conor, ex-liaison officer with the Yugoslav Partisans, is conducting his own private war. As he leads his hand-picked team of ruthless fighters deep behind enemy lines, it becomes clear that he regards French Resistance units and British Intelligence agents as more dangerous to his mission than the Germans.

A brilliant young electronics expert is killed by a car bomb seemingly meant for the head of the Foreign Office's Middle-Eastern Section. Intelligence officer Hugh Roskill is sent by David Audley on an investigation that takes him from London club-land to the Hampshire countryside, and deep into the complexities of Middle Eastern politics, to find the answer to two questions: who was the real target of the bomb? And what is Alamut?

Two KGB rivals, General Zarubin and Professor Nikolai Andrievich Panin, confront each other on a point overlooking the British Channel. Meanwhile, Henry Jaggard of British Intelligence has two pressing problems. He knows the Soviets are mounting a defensive program against a Polish dissident group in Britain, but he cannot intervene without jeopardizing his best inside agents. And Dr David Audley, of the Intelligence R&D Department, has been playing clever politics again