On a winter's night at the height of the Cold War, in a small town on East Germany's coastline, a young man is dragged from the sea and killed by the regmine's secret police. The witnesses are terrorised into silence. But a British woman is present and hears the shot which ended her lover's life.

A decade later, times have changed, and old enemies have become new friends. An ex-Captain in the Stasi's Counter Espionage section, Dieter Krause is an honoured guest at the headquarters of British Military Intelligence. He is confident that the skeletons in his past are hidden until...

Corporal Tracy Barnes, a clerk, attacks him in the officers' mess. She was there at the scene of the young man's murder ten years before. She knows Krause is responsible. But she can't prove it - she needs the witnesses to talk. To make them do so, she must follow Krause to Germany. For her, the waiting time is finally over...