Celia used to lie for a living. Henry still does. Can they ever trust each other?
Nine years ago, Henry and Celia were lovers and colleagues, both working for the CIA station in Vienna. Until terrorists hijacked a plane at the airport, a rescue attempt, staged from the inside, went terribly wrong and everyone on board was killed.
Members of the Austrian CIA station were witness to this terrible tragedy, gathering intelligence from their sources during those tense hours, collating what could be observed from outside the plane with a series of texts coming from one of their agents on-board. So when it all went wrong, the question had to be asked: had their agent been compromised, and how?
That night has continued to haunt all of those involved; for Henry and Celia, it brought to an end their relationship. Celia decided she'd had enough; she left the agency, married and had children, and is now living an ordinary life in the Californian suburbs. Henry is still a CIA analyst, and has travelled to the US to see her one more time, to relive the past, maybe, or to put it behind him once and for all.
But neither of them can forget that question: had their agent been compromised, and how? And each of them also wonders what role their lunch companion might have played in the way things unfolded...
All the Old Knives is Olen Steinhauer's most intense, most thrilling and most unsettling novel to date - from the New York Times bestselling author deemed by many to be John le Carré's heir apparent.