In a Casablanca hotel, a woman with nothing left to lose prepares to end her life. Hilary Craven has lost her marriage and her only child, and travel has done nothing to dull the grief. Before she can act, a British intelligence officer named Jessop interrupts her with a strange proposition: rather than die by her own hand, she can risk death in service of her country. A run of brilliant scientists has been vanishing from the West, their destinations untraceable, and one of the missing men's wives has just died in a plane crash carrying messages she never delivered. Jessop asks Hilary to take that dead woman's place and walk knowingly into whatever trail swallowed the others. Assuming the identity of Olive Betterton, Hilary follows a chain of contacts out of Morocco and into territory where she cannot tell allies from captors. Every traveller she meets may be a fellow recruit, an informer, or an executioner, and a single slip in her borrowed past could expose her. As the journey carries her further from anything familiar, the despair that once defined her gives way to a sharpening will to survive and to understand exactly what waits at the end of the road. Set against the suspicions of the early Cold War, this is a story of espionage, false names, and a reluctant agent who rediscovers a reason to live precisely when she expected to die.