When Ethan Caldwell's phone rings at 2:47 AM, he knows it's bad. It's Yousef—the Iraqi interpreter who fell in a sewage ditch outside Baqubah and kept translating, who made it to America and was finally safe. Except now he's trapped in Kurdistan. His passport held by a CIA officer who won't let him leave until he completes one more mission. The officer is David Chen, and he recruited Yousef using Ethan's own letters of recommendation. Now Chen wants Ethan's help to finish what they started. To free Yousef, Ethan flies to Erbil and enters a world where CIA and DIA run operations without coordination, where a Kurdish intelligence officer plays all sides, and where Iranian operatives are planning something that will get people killed. The fog is thick. The players are numerous. The costs keep accumulating. When an eleven-year-old girl is kidnapped to force cooperation, the abstract becomes concrete. Ethan must decide what he's willing to trade, whom he's willing to compromise, and whether saving one life justifies the harm he'll cause to others. From the checkpoints of war-torn Kurdistan to the safe houses of Brooklyn, The Cost of It is a literary espionage thriller about the trap you set for yourself and the permanent weight of trying to do slightly more good than harm. Book Two in The Ethan Caldwell Stories.