Sent to Manhattan as part of the British effort to build intelligence into the new United Nations Organization "from the foundations up," Agent Peter Cotton wakes up in the Ogden Clinic on East 76th Street, a private facility reserved for very special patients and veterans. He is told he was found badly bruised, slumped in a doorway, and that he had been injected with at least three truth-drugs. He is lucky to be alive. Plagued by vertigo, color blindness, and tunnel vision, and unable to be certain what is real and what hallucinatory, Cotton must piece together what has happened to him,  and find out who is responsible and why. What he discovers is even more unsettling. His biggest uncertainty? Why he has been allowed to live.