Seventh Floor

Six CIA officers have spent twenty-five years stealing other people's secrets. They are dear friends and cherished enemies, and now they must steal each other's.

In Singapore, a Russian arrives with a secret to sell. He is killed, and Sam Joseph, the CIA officer sent to meet him, disappears. Artemis Procter, the operational chief, is made the scapegoat for the disaster and forced out of the service. Months later Sam turns up at her door with an explosive claim: a Russian mole is buried deep in the highest ranks of the CIA.

As Procter and Sam investigate, they arrive at a shortlist of suspects made up of her closest friends and her fiercest enemies. The hunt forces her to revisit her checkered past in the service, and it puts the pair in the sights of a savvy Russian spymaster who will go to any length to protect Moscow's mole at Langley. The story moves from Langley to Moscow, Paris and beyond. It follows friendships forged through sweat and blood, from the Farm to Afghanistan and the executive Seventh Floor of CIA headquarters, and tests them to the limit.

The novel considers friendship in a faithless business, what we can truly know about the people we love most, and what it means to love a place that does not love you back. David McCloskey is a former CIA analyst who also wrote Damascus Station and Moscow X.