Time of Exile

TIME OF EXILE is the concluding volume of Gaither Stewart's Europe Trilogy. The long and complex story begins with The Trojan Spy and continues with the second volume, Lily Pad Roll. Together these first two parts present a live canvas depicting major political events on the continent of Europe reaching back to the Cold War and extending to current events and tensions affecting Europe today.

In The Trojan Spy, the Russian double agent, Anatoly Nikitin, run by spymasters of both East and West, organizes his own spy ring with the goal of uncovering the deadliest of the spy rings, the organizers of terrorism. As both participant and observer of the events, an aspiring young journalist, Karl Heinz, comes to understand the world of ideology and espionage and becomes a major link between all three novels.

Lily Pad Roll shows the development of America's network of military bases throughout the world, especially those encircling its arch enemy Russia. In military jargon, a lily pad means a kind of outpost or staging area, in fact a new kind of military base, scaled down from the major bases one finds in Germany and Italy. As they move across Europe from Munich to Belgrade, Istanbul, Odessa and Moscow, a new character emerges, Elmer Redway-a prefigurement of Edward Snowden-demonstrating once again how fiction can sometimes precede real events. Redway, hacker genius and whistleblower, deserts from the US military in East Europe and provides top secret information to the world media. Elmer thus becomes the exile, hunted by western intelligence services and living a life under false identities. He is protected by an underground rat line as he continues to expose the true nature of world events. This is his story.