There, her academic brother Kevin has been corralled into working for corporate interests, including unknowingly assisting Iraqi intelligence agents to be admitted to the U.S. under the guise of Jordanian research students.

With his military nurse wife having been dispatched to the Gulf to prepare for war, he has time to contemplate connections between some odd events - including the death of a Middle-Eastern student, a horse with botulism, and the sudden change in fortunes of his real estate broker.

Vandeventer is stymied by Millikan, an American diplomat who has been misled by (a fictional version of) Tariq Aziz that Saddam Hussein will not invade Kuwait.

She is then unwittingly co-opted by CIA agent Hennessy, who has a rivalry with Millikan and has formed a group to weed out moles but needs to act domestically, i.e. out of the agency's remit, to do so.

In the course of his police duties and investigation, Banks had befriended a Wakhi (called "Vakhan Turks" in the text) whose network has a mole in the CIA and has also been monitoring the phony students.