The Middle East. 1941. Captain Oliver Enwin, interpreter for British Intelligence, has gone missing and it is up to one of his fellow officers, the story's narrator, to track him down. In the course of his investigations of a colonel's widow and her daughter, Valerie, living a lonely life in a high valley in Lebanon, he comes across the trail of the missing officer.

But the narrator's life is also threatened, and he must forge a pact with the man he has been sent to find, as well as making both women his allies. But who can be trusted in such uncertain times? And will the two men alone be able to suppress a German-inspired Arab revolt that threatens all their lives?