"What we need is an American."That was the word from British Military Intelligence. It was October 27, 1941, and Hitler was victorious from Calais to the outskirts of Moscow. Only Britain held out against him, fighting alone, stretched to the limit. Her one hope of survival was that the United States would enter the war, and the Germans were hell-bent to prevent that. It all came down to one desperate gamble.That they needed was an American like David Steadman. Barely recovered from a shrapnel wound sustained in the Spanish Civil War, the rich young adventurer undertakes a lethal mission at the urging of his best friend's beautiful wife, whom he has come, guilt-ridden, to adore. As he flees across Europe, pursued by an SS captain who has tracked him from Spain, Steadman finds everyone turning against him. Through a farrago of passions and dangerous motives, both the British and the Germans want him dead—along with the incendiary secret he carries locked in his memory.