Codename Vienna

VIENNA, 1945. Charles Eddington has failed here before.

Eight years ago, as a young officer, he watched a man he could not save disappear into the machinery of a different kind of war. Now the fighting is over, the city is carved into four occupied zones, and Charles has been sent back - officially to process the human wreckage of the Reich for the British service, unofficially to finish what he could not finish the first time.

The man he is looking for is still alive. Barely. Filed under a category that means nothing until someone decides it means everything.

Standing between them is Sir Reginald Ashworth-Cole - the architect of every disaster of Charles's career, and the most reasonable man he has ever met. Sir Reginald is not a villain. He is worse: he is right about almost everything, and he believes, with his whole considered conscience, that one old man is an acceptable price for the machine that might hold the line against the century to come.

To win, Charles cannot out-argue him. He has to make the argument not matter - with a Russian major's help he hasn't earned, a registrar's forged mercy, and Eve, the one person left who reads him as exactly what he is.

In the coldest city of the war, in a winter with no heat and no time, Charles Eddington has one chance to prove that no institution, however necessary, is worth the one person it proposes to spend.

Codename: Vienna is Book Five of The Eddington Files.