Harris chooses as his narrator the participant in these events with the sharpest sense of justice: the newly promoted Colonel Georges Picquart (a real and rather important character from French history). As the story opens, he's taking over command of the Statistical Section, the operations arm of the French Army's intelligence division. With this good soldier, a life-long bachelor "married" to his career, as our guide, we move through the boulevards and drawing rooms and dining rooms of Parisian society with an ease and pleasure associated with the high life, enjoying the gossip, the cuisine, the marriages and adulterous love affairs (including his own, with the wife of a senior official in the Foreign Ministry) of the Belle Epoque. Finding his new office a jumble of files and cash (for bribing informants), the new colonel goes about the business of putting his new command in order just as the events of the Dreyfus case come to light.
Picquart, as he himself puts it, soon learns his "first lesson in the cabalistic power of 'secret intelligence': two words that can make otherwise sane men abandon their reason and cavort like idiots." Despite evidence he unearths that suggests the real spy in the French military may be someone other than Dreyfus, his commanding officer, the at first quite sympathetic General Charles Arthur Gonse, orders him to cease his investigations. "This is an army," the general pronounces, "not a society for debating ethics. The Minister of War gives orders to the Chief of Staff, the Chief of Staff gives orders to me, and I give orders to you. I now order you formally, and for the final time, not to investigate anything connected with the Dreyfus case, and not to disclose anything about it to anyone who isn't authorized to receive such information. Heaven help you if you disobey. Understand?"
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Books
Robert Harris: 'The Ghost' of Tony Blair