On a date referred to as "the 14th", the Protagonist leads a covert CIA extraction during a staged terrorist siege at an Opera House in Kyiv. He is saved from KORD forces by an unknown operative wearing a red trinket. The Protagonist retrieves an artifact but his team is captured and tortured. He swallows a suicide pill but wakes up to find it was a fake; a test that only he has passed. He is recruited by "Tenet", a secretive organization that briefs him on objects with "inverted" entropy that move backward through time. With his handler Neil, he traces them to Priya Singh, an arms dealer in Mumbai.