Nina Kobelyatskaya

Criminals kidnapped the son of the chairwoman of the city administration. Feelings of helplessness and fear follow. A series of checks, mocking calls, humiliating requests for help to colleagues in the "shadow business" goes on and on.

Ukraine, 1919. Bolshevik counter-intelligence agents work to stop an uprising by White Russian nationalist-monarchist counterrevolutionaries. A young countess finds herself caught between her family and class allegiance and burgeoning Communist sympathies inflamed by a chance meeting with a handsome young Ukrainian chekist.

The plot centers on a large-scale conspiracy by a group of US military personnel, led by General James Scott, against the current President Jordan Lyman. Further events show that the President, who sent his closest aides and friends to investigate, easily and almost indifferently accepts the news of their deaths, because he is only interested in his own person.