On a winter s night at the height of the cold war, in a small town on the Baltic coast of East Germany, a young man is dragged from the sea and killed by the regime s secret police. The witnesses are terrorized into silence. But a British woman is present and hears the shot which ends her lover s life. A decade later, times have changed, the Wall dividing two great ideologies has crumbled and old enemies have become new friends. An ex-captain in the Stasi s counter espionage section, Dieter Krause is a f ted guest at the headquarters of British military intelligence. He is a prized asset, able to give a detailed profile of a rising star in the Russian Ministry of Defence. He is confident that the skeletons in his past are hidden, until... Corporal Tracy Barnes, a clerk, attacks him in the officers mess. For her, the waiting time is over. She was there at the scene of the young man s murder ten years before. She knows Krause is responsible. But she can t prove it - she needs the witnesses to talk. To make them do so, she must follow Krause to Germany, determined to see a long-delayed victory for justice. But defeat may mean a place on the mortuary slab.