Sadie is the novel’s protagonist and narrator. A former government operative turned spy-for-hire, Sadie is characterized in large part through her work in espionage. She is a successful spy because she is ruthless. She is highly manipulative, has no moral qualms about exploiting or harming her targets or the people surrounding them, and feels no remorse about the lives that she ruins in the course of her work. She has duplicitous relationships with Lucien and several of the Moulinards, uses Nadia for information, lies to Pascal, and has a long history of other such associations both during her government days and as a spy-for-hire among the shadowy world of European, contract-based security work. She is also a successful agent because of her intelligence. She is intellectual by nature and spent time studying rhetoric and philosophy in a high-level graduate program. Because of this experience, she has familiarity with both the history of various leftist ideological movements and activist circles in Europe. She understands figures like Guy Debord and his relationship to present-day figures like Pascal Balmy, and she can use that information to aid in her investigations. She is fluent in several languages and is highly verbally intelligent, which allows her to communicate effectively with a broad range of people, to manipulate them, and to navigate tricky social situations with ease and aplomb.