The Five Wise Men of Whitehall want to force Sam McCready to retire because they think his place in the Secret Service is not needed anymore. This forces him to ask for a hearing. He chooses a colleague named Dennis Gaunt to speak on his behalf. Gaunt recounts 4 major events in McCready's career.
This book is a collection of those four adventures in novella format, with an added prologue, epilogue, and three interludes between the tales.
The stories are: