As a young double agent infiltrating the Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied Paris, Andrew Hale found himself caught up in a secret war that culminated in a night of terror, death and failure on the icy slopes of Mount Ararat in 1948. Fifteen years later, with the Cold War at its height, a mysterious phone-call offers him a chance to return to the mountain. Returning means confronting the nightmare that has haunted his adult life: a lethal unfinished operation code-name Declare. Hale has to return - he knows what is at stake. But he also knows that he can't trust anyone and that his survival will depend on more than just his hard-won tradecraft .

From the corridors of Whitehall to the trackless wastes of the Arabian desert, from the ruins of post-war Berlin to the KGB torture chambers of Cold War Moscow, Hale, the fiery and beautiful Communist agent Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, and Kim Philby, enigmatic traitor to the British cause, are inexorably driven towards a deadly confrontation on the high glaciers of Mount Ararat, in the very shadow of the fabulous and perilous Ark.