Cairo, 1962. Richard Thomson was already having a very bad day when someone left a corpse lying on the rear steps of his hotel. Its head had been lopped off like a ripe melon and had been posed so it could look back down at its own body. A message? In this international mystery thriller, there is no doubt about it.

Thomson is a burned-out CIA Agent and the body belongs to Mahmoud Yussuf, a fat petty thief and some-time spy who is selling photographs of a long-abandoned RAF base in the Egyptian desert. What the photos have to do with a dead Israeli Mossad agent, Nazi rocket scientists, the fanatical Moslem Brotherhood, and two missing Egyptian tank regiments could start the next Arab-Israeli War or stop it.

Alone and on the run, no one believes Thomson's story - not the CIA, the US Ambassador, and most assuredly not Captain Hassan Saleh, Chief of the Homicide Bureau of the Cairo Police, who wants to hang Thomson for murder.

Like Night of the Generals, this is a murder mystery wrapped inside a CIA spy thriller and historic fiction. The slums of Cairo are a tinder box of discontent and the first faint whiffs of a military coup against the shaky, new government of Abdel Gamal Nasser are in the air. Tick Toc, Tick Toc! In this CIA action adventure and suspense thriller, if he doesn't solve the mystery, something is about to blow up in Thomson's face at Noon on Thursday.