Ted Mundy, a British soldier's son born in 1947, in the newly independent Pakistan, and Sasha, the refugee son of an East German Lutheran pastor and his wife who have sought sanctuary in the West. The two men meet first as students in the riot-torn West Berlin of the late sixties, again in the grimy looking-glass of Cold War espionage and, most terribly, in today's unipolar world of terror, counter-terror and the war of lies.