On Christmas Eve in 1978, General Anthony Blackburn, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is killed in a New York brothel.

Some time later, Soviet nuclear physicist Dmitri Yuri Yurievich is killed on a hunting trip in the Russian countryside.

Meanwhile, Taleniekov, in Moscow, is summoned by his former teacher, retired Istrebiteli Aleksie Krupskaya, who tells him of an international cabal of assassins known as the Matarese who were headquartered in Corsica.

He flees Russia through a CIA escape route in Sevastapol and travels to the United States, sending an old subordinate to contact Scofield.

He and Taleniekov face off in a hotel in downtown Washington in a three-day-long exchange, eventually making contact, neutralizing the assassins, and escaping together.

He is saved by Scofield, and the two encounter a woman named Antonia, who takes them to her grandmother, known in the hills as the "whore of Villa Matarese".

She tells them story of Guillaume de Matarese, a wealthy landowner and businessman who is ruined by corrupt governments in England and France to stop his interference in international business interests.

In April 1911, he summoned five men who had been similarly ruined to the villa for a banquet and proposed the idea of offering assassination services, ultimately promising that those present would "inherit the earth."

The names of the guests were Joshua Appleton II (USA), Sir John Waverly (England), Prince Andrei Voroshin (Russia), Count Alberto Scozzi (Italy), and Manuel Ortiz Ortega (Spain).

After escaping from the hills, Scofield and Taleniekov conclude that the Matarese are financing terrorist groups all over the world, including Baader-Meinhof, the PLO, and the Red Brigades, with the goal of paralyzing governments.

There, with the help of lawyer Heinrich Kassel, he finds that Voroshin secretly left Russia and became Ansel Verachten, founder of an arms competitor of Krupp.

Scofield contacts Roger Symonds, an MI6 colleague, and asks him to set up a meeting with David Waverly, the grandson of John and England's current Foreign Secretary.

Nicholas Guiderone is revealed to be a child prodigy from Corsica who was discovered by Guillaume who wants to build a world based on the economic marketplace.

[citation needed] The title appears to have been inspired by a popular, now-gone steak restaurant and jazz spot named Rocco Matarese's Circle in Newington, Connecticut, about 10 miles from Wesleyan University, Ludlum's alma mater.

[3] The film adaptation, originally scheduled to be released in 2013, was derailed when MGM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 3, 2010, and Cronenberg stated that he did not think the project would be resurrected.