Greenmantle

Sir Walter Bullivant locks both doors of his Foreign Office room and hands Richard Hannay half a sheet of note-paper bearing three words: Kasredin, cancer, v. I. The agent who carried it out of the Bakhtiari hills reached camp with ten bullet holes in him and lived ten minutes. He was Bullivant's son. Something is rising in the Ottoman east, and Germany means to use it.

Hannay goes east without uniform or plan — a Dutch alias, a German colonel's study, coal barges on the frozen Danube, the beggars' quarter of Constantinople. With him: Sandy Arbuthnot, who rode through Yemen; an American who plays Patience while the walls close in; and Peter Pienaar, an old Boer hunter. Against them, a woman who knows what the East is waiting for.