Code to Zero

Code to Zero is a thriller by Ken Follett, published in 2000 and set in America in 1958, during the race to put a satellite into orbit before the Soviet Union does.

A man comes round in the public lavatory of a railway station with no memory of his past. He takes himself for an alcoholic derelict on the evidence of his clothes and his surroundings, but his instincts, his manners and his intelligence keep pointing elsewhere, and by pulling books from the shelves of a library until he finds one he can understand, he establishes that he is Dr Lucas, a rocket scientist well known in his field. He is also responsible for the design of a rocket that America is about to launch in an attempt to answer Sputnik. As he reconstructs his life he uncovers a conspiracy to hold the country back in the space race, and the people behind it turn out to be men and women he knew at Harvard, where a group of four friends ended up on opposite sides of the politics of the period.

Follett writes the book as a chase and a puzzle at once, with the reader learning the protagonist's history at the same rate he does.