Berlin. May 1945. A city without institutions in a continent that has become a wasteland.
Thousands of former Nazis have been killed in Allied purges, and many more incarcerated in the very concentration camps they themselves established. But the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, has a problem. One of those former Nazis is actually a British spy, Edward Kayne, who has intercepted a top-secret document that Churchill insists is vital to settling the peace. Martin Geller is selected to journey into the heart of darkness and extract Kayne, but a carrot is dangled before him. His daughter, Zaya, had been abducted two years before as part of the Lebensborn programme—the kidnapping of children deemed to be ripe for Germanisation. Zaya is now in the same camp. Geller sets off on a two-pronged mission—to extract Kayne and rescue Zaya. But Geller will discover that far from settling the peace, the document that Kayne has intercepted threatens the opposite. Can Geller save his daughter from the gates of hell? And how does Geller reconcile the rescue of Kayne with his knowledge that he may be condemning the world to a new Armageddon?
