Deep in the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources sits a nondescript bureaucrat named Konstantin Malin. From his shabby office Malin controls half the nation's oil industry, making him one of the most feared and wealthy men in Russia. His public face is Richard Lock, a diffident English lawyer bound to Malin by marriage, complacency, greed, and by a complex lie that neither can escape. But the lie cannot hold forever, and someone has hired Benjamin Webster, an investigator at a London corporate intelligence firm, to ruin Malin.