A New York Times Bestselling Author Berlin, 1948. In the West, a defiant, blockaded city is barely surviving on airlifted supplies; in the East, political reconstruction is undermined by Cold War compromises. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer who fled the Nazis for America and is now in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts, makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin.