The story jumps between several time periods. In Havana in 1954, Gunther plans to flee the country rather than being pressed into the service of the secret police of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. However his escape is thwarted when his vessel is stopped by a US Navy patrol vessel and he is taken to the base at Guantanamo Bay. Realising that they have got hold of Bernie Gunther, suspected as a potential war criminal he flown back to West Germany via New York.
In Germany he is incarcerated by the American authorities at Landsberg Prison near Munich, filled with war criminals. Under interrogation, he relates his experiences in 1941 during Operation Barbarossa around Minsk where he commited a retaliatory massacre of Soviet NKVD agents. It soon becomes clear that the CIA are more interested in his complex history with Erich Mielke dating back to 1931 and the dying days of the Weimar Republic. As an officer of the Berlin police he had rescued the German Communist militant from likely death at the hands of Nazi Party stormtroopers, a few months later Gunther tried to arrest him following the murder of two Berlin policemen but Meilke has fled the country.
The two encountered each other again in 1940 when Gunther went to Vichy France with orders to identify and Meilke. Having been sent there by Reinhard Heydrich of the SS, Gunther is reluctant to have Meilke arrested and summarily executed rather than the judicial trial he believes he deserves for his killing of the police officer and he pretends not to recognise him, sparing his life again. At the end of the Second World War with Gunther now a prisoner in an East German concentration camp following his capture at the
Battle of Königsberg, Meilke pretends to return the favour by helping Gunther escape. In fact Meilke plans to have Gunther killed by an assassin on the journey, believing he knows too much about his dirty linen now he is a rising figure in the East German secret police.
Back in 1954 Gunther finds himself in a complex game between the CIA and French Intelligence as they hope to lure Meilke across the border into West Berlin and seize him.
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