It is early 1996. In the U.S. presidential primary campaign the leading Republican contender, Hal Reynolds, looks like everyone's dream candidate: good-looking, charming, a brilliant military record, and a distinguished history of public service. Polls show him gaining easy nomination and winning the election in a walk.

Yet, as the novel opens, hints of scandal surface, not in the U.S. but in Moscow, where Cass, Reynolds's niece, is doing research in the Soviet Archives. Cass gets access to a tape suggesting that at the end of the Cold War, the KGB had an agent, code name Oracle, in the highest reaches of the U.S. government. If the tape is genuine, Oracle, once thought to have been unmasked and caught in Brussels in 1984, may in truth be her uncle.

The novel recounts Cass's search for the truth, a journey that takes her on a perilous tour of the dark side of present-day Moscow and finally to a Washington, D.C. courtroom, where political and personal history intertwine. In resolving the issue of her uncle's candidacy, Cass is forced to confront the ghosts of her family's past.