After his return to Paris, Ferrar becomes involved with a French-born Marquesa who has already lured one Spanish émigré to his death, in the end managing to disengage her from her Nationalist handlers.
His next task is to purchase anti-aircraft shells from the naval arsenal at Odessa, which involves recruiting local criminals to impersonate the Russian secret police.
Ferrar and de Lyon join the ship in Constanța, but it is tracked along the way and attacked by an armed Italian naval launch off Sicily, only escaping by shooting out its searchlight at the height of a storm.
[5] For Carrie Callaghan in the Washington Independent Review of Books, "Ferrar's adventures feel episodic",[6] while for Mary Burns of the Historical Novel Society the hero is "two-dimensional" and some of the other characters the predictable stock in trade of this kind of novel.
[10] One of the links in this novel to others in the Night Soldiers series is the reappearance of Count Janos Polanyi, the senior Hungarian diplomat first featured in Kingdom of Shadows (2000) - and later too.