March 1947, Berlin

The phone rang at midnight. Max Weber answered it in his apartment in the American sector, wearing the same clothes he had worn for three days. The voice on the other end was Swiss German, accented and urgent: They think they've won. But the game isn't over.

Max didn't ask who it was. He knew. The man on the other end was Anton von Hohenzollern, a name Max had never heard until three hours ago, when a man in a dark coat had left a message at his door in the French sector, telling him to answer the phone.

"Who are you?" Max said.

"My name is Anton von Hohenzollern. I was in Zurich for five years. I'm ready to come back. I need your help."

Max lit a cigarette. The flame from his match illuminated a face that was thirty-two years old and looked fifty. He had been a intelligence officer for British Military Intelligence in the Middle East, and before that, a soldier on the Western Front, and before that, a university student in Heidelberg who believed in nothing and was proud of it.

"What do you need help with?" Max asked.

"My family lost everything after the war. The estates, the titles, the land. I want to get it back."

Max laughed. It was a dry, humorless laugh that sounded like stones grinding together. "You want to get back what your family lost in a war we lost. You're barking up the wrong tree, Herr von Hohenzollern."

"It's not about the war. It's about justice. My family didn't start this war. We didn't fight in it. We were used by it."

"Everyone was used by it. That's the point."

Max was about to hang up when the man on the other end said his real name. Not Max Weber. Another name. A name Max had not heard in twelve years, a name he had buried so deep he had almost convinced himself it had never existed.

The name stopped him. It stopped him the way a bullet stops a body—abruptly, completely, with no possibility of continuing in the same direction.

"Who told you that name?" Max said.

"That's not important. What's important is that I know who you are. And I know what you can do. And I need you to do it for me."

Max hung up. He sat in the dark, smoking, thinking. The name—the real name—was a key. And someone had just used it to open a door he had spent twelve years keeping shut.