By the beginning of July 1985, when the novel opens, Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet engineer who’d spent years passing radar secrets to the CIA, had just been arrested in Moscow; his case officer was ambushed and expelled days later. These events came weeks after Washington had arrested a retired Navy officer named John Walker and members of his own family for seventeen years of spying for the Soviets. Cases like these would pile up fast enough that by year’s end the press had a name for it: 1985, the Year of the Spy.
And the year kept producing its own strange theater: in August, a senior KGB officer who defected in Rome, then walked back across three months later; in September, CIA officer, forced out two years earlier for failing the polygraph before his Moscow posting, slipped FBI’s surveillance and turned up on the other side; a chemical compound dusted on doorknobs and car doors, discovered that same month on the skin of American diplomats, causing an international outcry. This is the weather Jack walks into from the novel’s first pages—not a backdrop, but the actual pressure he has to live through.