The setting is Belin. Into this divided city, wrenched netween East and West, between past and present, comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British- American surveillance team. Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life- and to lose his unwanted innocence. The promise of his new life begins to be filfilled as Leonard becomes a crucial part of the surveillance team, while simultaneously being initiated into a new world of love and sex by Maria, a beautiful young Gemran woman. It is a promise that turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening- a night ewhen Leonard Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.