Western intelligence agents try, by all means necessary, to prevent a Communist-bloc defector from leaving the West in his bid to return home to lead an uprising.
When his brother vanishes without a trace, American Robert Stone goes to his last known location: a remote English village. Robert's investigation leads him to the mansion of Jonathon Lanceford, a man obsessed with the Gothic works of Edgar Allen Poe, and his beautiful and enigmatic niece Dominie...
Maggie and Harry Dowl arrive in England to inspect a house left to Maggie. The house has a dilapidated tennis court, but this seems to have some force which takes over the daughter of the local holy man, as well as causing tennis balls to gush blood and kill people with animated nets.
' I'm a spy, you know ... I've got to report back.' Conroy has been asked by the teaching order's recruitment officer Brother Martin Jerome , to be guide and help to the most promising candidate, 16-year-old Stephen. To Stephen it is just another of the pressures on him at this critical time.
