It is 1913 and the world is a dangerous place. The Great Powers are locked into a frenzied arms race, the decadent Ottoman empire is in retreat, and the Austrian and Russian Empires intrigue ceaselessly to further their own ambitions. In St. Petersburg, the weak Tsar is preoccupied with his afflicted son and has isolated himself from his starving subjects.

Pyotr Ryzhkov, a government agent , is used to keeping his head down and minding his own business. But the immediate cover-up of the death of a child prostitute, which he happens to witness, drives him to probe into what he is sure is murder.

As he investigates the cover-up of the murder, Ryzhkov probes the inner sanctum of power from his own superiors in the secret police to the interlocking interests of St. Petersburg’s military and business families. His dogged pursuit eventually leads him to uncover an international conspiracy to overthrow the Tsar and destabilize Russia - a high-stakes plan that threatens his country and his life.

Moscow in the summer of 1918.

After a series of harrowing experiences on the Western Front, Pyotr Ryzhkov is working for French intelligence in Moscow. Arrested by agents of the newly formed Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, he is certain that he will be executed in a blood-splattered Lubyanka courtyard. Instead he finds himself being pressured into working with this old Okhrana boss, Velimir Antonovich Zezulin who has changed his identity and rehabilitated himself as a Cheka controller.

What Zezulin wants to know is the exact whereabouts and condition of the Imperial family. The Romanovs, exiled to Tobolsk for the winter, have suddenly been moved to a far more militant region - Yekaterinburg, home to the ultra-loyal Ural soviet. But Yekaterinburg is a city under attack. All along the Trans-Siberian railroad former Czechoslovak prisoners of war have joined with White forces and now they approach the outskirts. Ryzhkov’s mission: travel to Yekaterinburg, penetrate Czech lines if they have already taken the city, find out and report back on the situation of the Romanovs.

The events in July of 1918 in the Ipatiev house will be mired in confusion for nearly a century. Rumours will be repeated as history. But the true fate of the Romanovs will be the most closely held secret in the Kremlin.