A few years after the end of the Second World War, Jack Wilton – newly-arrived at the CIA’s northern Italian station – journeys to a monastery high in the Alps where an Anglo-German man thought to be responsible for the recent shooting of a Soviet double-agent has sought shelter. Wilton hopes that this man, possibly a former Communist agent now on the run from the Russians, will agree to help the West in return for the CIA’s protection.
But Thomas Stern, the man whom Wilton finds, is not at all who he appears to be. Over the following days and nights he tells the young CIA man about his time in wartime Berlin, shadowing a flamboyant Communist agent for British intelligence and aiding in the upper class resistance to the Nazi regime. The Berlin he describes is a nightmare city governed by fear and paranoia and rendered a living hell by the constant Allied bombing raids. Wilton can’t help but wonder, though, just how much of what Stern says is the truth. Was he really working for the British all that time, for example, or was he perhaps driven by other, darker motives? Stern’s stories come to haunt Wilton when in later years he finds himself posted in the now-divided city, walking the same streets, grappling with the same moral dilemmas and even involved with one of Stern’s former female friends.
Untangling the truth behind Stern’s role in the murky world of wartime espionage causes Wilton to question his own involvement in this dirty business in which loyalties count for little, blackmail is used against friends and enemies both, and the human weakness for romance is too often seen as just another weapon in either side’s arsenal of dirty tricks. But once you’ve entered this dark maze, is there ever any way out, other than death itself?
