The Russia House

Three MI5 officers drag Barley Scott Blair into a Lisbon interrogation room, slapping photographs on a table and demanding to know why Katya Orlova handed a stranger a manuscript full of Soviet nuclear secrets. Barley flies to Moscow, contacts Katya, and pushes to locate the source, a dissident physicist nicknamed Dante. British intelligence equips Barley with a wire and sends him to Leningrad to collect a second notebook. The CIA, terrified the notebooks prove Soviet weakness is a bluff, polygraphs Barley and discovers his loyalty has shifted from London to Katya. On a third trip to Moscow, Katya receives a phone call from a compromised number. Barley realizes the trap, attends a publishing party, and walks into a Soviet building alone, trading the CIA's list of intelligence gaps for Katya's safe passage out of Russia.