It is night in Manhattan. The president of the United States is scheduled to have dinner with an old friend, but in the building across the street a man has disabled the security and stands at a window, a rifle in his hand. The assassination doesn't go according to plan, but this is only the beginning. Someone is recruiting a shadowy network of agents with the intention of creating terror. Their range is broad, their identities masked, their methods subtle.

For intelligence operative Sean Dillon, it is a routine passport check. But the events it will lead to will be as bloody as any he has ever known. The man he stops at Heathrow Airport is Caspar Rashid, born in England, with ties to a Bedouin tribe fiercely wedded to the old ways. Rashid's 13-year-old daughter, Sara, has been kidnapped by Rashid's own father and taken to Iraq to be married to one of the Middle East's most feared terrorists. When Rashid begs Dillon for help, he sees a chance to settle some old scores.

Treachery has a price, in the mesmerizing new Sean Dillon thriller from the Sunday Times-bestselling author. Helmand Province, Afghanistan: a lone convoy edges its way towards a deserted mountain village, led by US Army Rangers in Mastiff APVs. Stopping to search the area, the Rangers are hit by a massive roadside bomb, and as half the patrol lie dead or injured, the rest are ambushed with military precision.

Putin and the Russians have suffered too many killings of their own people in the past. Now they want the whole of the 'Prime Minister's private army' wiped out, including Blake Johnson and Charles Ferguson. Somebody is after them: Blake, Harry Miller, his sister, Monica, Harry Salter and Billy. The only people spared are Roper and Dillon. After surviving a car bomb, Ferguson heads a desperate search to uncover the perpetrator.

Disillusioned with the Putin government, famous Russian writer and ex-paratrooper Alexander Kurbsky decides he wants to disappear into the West. However, he is under no illusions about how the news will be greeted at home - he has seen too many of his countrymen die mysteriously at the hands of the thuggish Russian security services, so he makes elaborate plans with Charles Ferguson, Sean Dillon, and the rest of the group known informally as the Prime Minister's private army for his escape and concealment.

The murderous Rashid family were forced to pay the ultimate price for their crimes by the British government's secret enforcer, Sean Dillon, and his undercover team. Yet one member of that oil-rich dynasty was allowed to live, and that could have been Dillon's fatal mistake. Kate Rashid witnessed her brothers being killed one by one, and now she has sworn vengeance. Sean Dillon, White House operative Blake Johnson, even the US president himself...their time is coming, and only she knows how - or when.

In Ulster, Northern Ireland, a petty criminal kills a woman in a drunken car crash. Her sons swear revenge. In London, Sean Dillon and his colleagues in the 'Prime Minister's private army', fresh from defeating a deadly al-Qaeda operation, receive a warning: 'You may think you have weakened us, but you have only made us stronger'. In Washington, DC, a special projects director with the CIA, frustrated at not getting permission from the president for his daring antiterrorism plan, decides to put it in motion anyway. Soon the ripples from these events meet and overlap.

When Paul Rashid, leader of the Rashid Bedouin of Hazar in the Persian Gulf, uncovers an international conspiracy to deprive his family of the oil wealth that is their birthright, he vows to gain very public vengeance. The man sent to stop him is the British government’s uncompromising secret enforcer, Sean Dillon. It is a mission that will test him as never before, confronted by foes old and new in a deadly game of cat and mouse that will take him from Ireland to the USA and from the heart of the English countryside to the deserts of Hazar...and the very edge of danger.

Whilst checking up on the volatile situation in Kosovo, the US president's right-hand man, Blake Johnson, meets Major Harry Miller, a member of the British Cabinet. Miller is there doing his own checks for the British Prime Minister. When both men get involved with a group of Russian soldiers about to commit an atrocity, Miller puts an end to the scuffle with a bullet in the forehead of the ringleader. But this action has dire consequences not only for Miller and Johnson but for their associates, too.

Twenty years ago a young war hero saved a life and began a passionate affair. Now that young war hero is president of the United States, and a souvenir from his past, a beautiful daughter he never knew existed, surfaces as the first of many secrets to be kept from public knowledge. But someone, somewhere, has uncovered the truth. The girl is seized by religious zealots, and unless the president complies with their demands, her execution is certain. Yet if he gives in, the Middle East will ignite in war. He calls in the only men who can help: Sean Dillon and Blake Johnson.