Beirut, 1943. The French Mandate is ending — and someone is using its last unguarded months to settle an old account.
Charles Eddington arrives in the most beautiful city of the war with a title that means nothing and instructions no one will admit to having signed. Couriers are dying on the mountain roads above the city — careful men, on unconnected routes, none of them robbed. No one in the cracking machinery of the Mandate wants the question asked, least of all the charming French intelligence officer who befriends Charles over drinks at the St. Georges and warns him, with real affection, to look away.
But Charles has learned that the people a regime decides do not matter are the ones who can bring it down. Working through a fragile net of the city's keepers — a printer, a priest, a journalist who answers to no one — he builds the one weapon his enemy cannot read, and discovers that the hardest victory is the one you win by doing nothing at all.
The fourth novel in The Eddington Files. For readers of Alan Furst and Philip Kerr.