Mark Wolfe was the greatest spy of his generation. Now retired from active service for over two decades, his family know him as a quiet, affable civil servant with no idea how to use the TV remote.

Mark still works for MI6, helping to recruit new agents, fending off advances from private security companies who offer a far higher salary than his paymasters at Vauxhall Cross. But he hasn't got his hands dirty since the spying game involved dead-dropping intel beneath railway station clocks in East Berlin, Czechoslovakia and other foreign lands that no longer exist.

When his daughter reveals an unhealthy obsession with joining the service, he is reluctantly thrown back into a terrifying new world of modern espionage.