About the book: 2009 / The young scientist Thomas Betterton disappears, and then his wife dies mysteriously. Hilary Craven, who is trying to take her own life, receives an offer from secret agent Jessop that she cannot refuse, otherwise the multimillionaire, hungry for world domination, will be able to achieve his goal. The prototype of Thomas Betterton was the Italian nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, who in 1950 was secretly transported by Soviet intelligence to the USSR, where he continued the research begun in the West.