It’s 2007 and after more than thirty years service in MI5 David Nixon is retiring. The revolutionary left, the miners, the IRA have all been consigned to history and he is looking forward to a quiet future of birdwatching, gardening and reading. But his former employers have one last, quick job for him; to write a whitewashing report on a corrupt Tory Peer whose bribery in Iraq has come to the attention to the CIA. “Don’t find anything,” they tell him. “We haven’t got the budget.” But behind the bribery lies something darker. And when he starts to pull at the threads David finds himself the target of unseen forces, with so much of what he thought was history on his tail.