The Breaking

July 1943. The stalemate holds on every front; the cost of holding it is beginning, quietly, to show. In Berlin, a plot against the Chancellor is organized, betrayed, and ended in a courtyard at dawn. In Moscow, a Politburo member disappears from the rostrum, and no paper records where he has gone. In Cairo, now an open city under a German garrison, a British service that no longer has a country to defend continues, from a villa above the Nile, to maintain its lists.

Across the year that follows, the channel opened in Book One is tested as it has not been tested before. A German diplomat is recalled to Berlin for a conversation from which he is not expected to return. An English agent is taken, and does not break, and is traded — by arrangements she will never learn the shape of — for something else. A Red Army colonel, summoned to a basement in the Commissariat, is asked to explain a report he wrote eight years ago. And in London, an aging Prime Minister, reading a paper from Broadway Buildings by the light of a single lamp, understands at last what it is he has been asked to preserve.

The Breaking follows The Widening through the year in which the three-power order began to crack, and the question of what would emerge from the cracks became, for the first time, a question to which a plausible answer could be imagined.