A black cab. A pale green envelope. A driver with an Etonian accent who shouldn't know his name.By the time the door closes, Doctor Alistair Morphet - Australian pharmaceutical scientist, specialist in cephalopod toxins - is no longer a private citizen. He's been recruited, whether he likes it or not, into a war nobody has declared: a shadow contest over a nuclear question Whitehall won't name aloud, run through networks that answer to no one Parliament has heard of.His handler is a woman with decades of patience and a talent for keeping her own secrets closer than anyone else's. Beside him is an operative built for killing, and a woman whose file says one thing while everything about her insists on another. Somewhere inside the machinery meant to protect the country sits a mole - and no one, least of all the people running the operation, knows how deep it goes.Morphet's own expertise - the quiet, deniable science of poisons drawn from the sea - turns out to be exactly the kind of leverage a rising power will kill for. As the operation pulls him from London to Paris to the Middle East, he learns that everyone around him is playing a longer game than the one they've told him about, and that the woman who built this network may be the only one who understands how the pieces fit - assuming she's telling the truth about that too.The hidden war beneath the one that makes the papers.