A firefight reverberates through Moscow's dark, rain-soaked streets; shattered glass and screams echo in the air. In the lawless ways of Russia's capital city, the gunmen melt away into the night. Two men are dead, the targets not what they seem. A shadowy figure lopes along the riverbank outside the Kremlin walls. Known to all as Volk, a battle-hardened veteran of Russia's brutal war in Chechnya, he prowls Moscow's grim alleyways, a knife concealed...

Russian agent Alexei Volkovoy engages in a globe-trotting investigation into the murder of a prominent female journalist, who was found shot to death on the banks of the Techa River near a radioactive Russian village.