In 1939, Thomas Jefferson Danforth, a privileged man in his twenties, became embroiled in a plot that could have changed the world - a plot to kill Hitler. Now, in his ninety-first year, at the dawn of a troubled new era, he sits in the luxury of New York's Century Club and tells his tale to the young man from Washington he has summoned, for reasons of his own, to hear it.
Danforth travelled to Europe to provide cover for a mysterious female assassin, Anna Klein, who posed as his secretary. Fuelled by the enigma of her origins, Danforth fell deeply and obsessively in love. Was she, as she claimed, an Armenian orphaned by the Turkish genocide of 1915? Which of the roles she played represents the real Anna Klein?
The assassination was to take place at a Munich restaurant, but Hitler left early, and the conspirators were arrested by the Gestapo. To his surprise, Danforth was released, but of Anna there was no word. The plotters were betrayed - but why, and by whom? Was it possible that Anna herself could have been the traitor?
These are the questions that shape Danforth's life and quest in the decades that follow. It is a journey of ever-shifting alliances and betrayals that will lead him across a war-torn world, from the ruins of Berlin to the Road of Skulls in Stalin's gulag archipelago, from a hovel in the Ukraine to the Caspian port of Baku, in search of the answers that will piece together the real story of Anna Klein.
