It's late winter, 2020, and Nick has been pulled out of the CIA's Kabul office and sent to Paris for what sounds like a simple assignment.
Posing as a graduate student at a local polytechnical institute, his task is to build a case against Abdul Haqq, a brilliant engineering student suspected of building bombs for Hezbollah.
What should be an open-and-shut case soon becomes a tangled mess as Nick finds himself drawn into a friendship with the charismatic young engineer, then falls hard for Ab.