Cologne, 1949. In this bombed-out city, Hanno Dasch is king of the biggest black market in postwar Germany. Nobody knows how he does it, other than his enigmatic daughter and the war criminal he keeps as his bodyguard. What worries Allied Intelligence is that Dasch will start dealing with Russia, making an inroad for Stalin's KGB, so the CIA sets up an undercover operation using disgraced US Army officer Nathan Carter. But in this stand-alone thriller from the creator of the Inspector Pekkala series, Carter soon finds this black market ring has already been compromised—by someone even more dangerous than the Russians.