Alexei Aleksandrovich Rostovtsev is a retired colonel who served in Soviet intelligence for a quarter of a century, sixteen of which were abroad; writer, author of many books and publications, member of the Russian Writers' Union. “...Counterintelligence and intelligence gave me inexhaustible material for my literary exercises for the rest of my life. My stories contain the cruel truth of operational work, which must be done with clean hands. For reasons of secrecy, I replaced the nicknames of the agents, the identifying information of the persons involved, and shifted the time and space frames of the events. Everything else is true..."