The book tells the story of Ted Mundy, the
Pakistan-born son of a British army officer, who as a student becomes proficient in the German language. He joins a 1960s-era student protest group in
West Berlin and becomes a lifelong friend of a
West German student anarchist named Sasha. Having been brutally beaten by West Berlin police and ejected from Germany, Mundy fails at several careers; as a teacher at an English prep school, as a newspaper reporter, a radio interviewer, and a novelist. Eventually Mundy obtains a position with the
British Council. Meanwhile, Sasha has defected to
East Germany to become a member of the notorious
Stasi secret police. On a trip to East Germany with a youth theatre group, Mundy and Sasha meet again. By this time Sasha has become totally disillusioned with the
Communist Bloc and enlists the naïve Mundy to become a double agent. Sasha has access to
state secrets and he recruits Mundy to help him smuggle them out of East Germany and deliver them to MI6, the
British Secret Service. Their efforts contribute to the collapse of the GDR and eventual destruction of the
Berlin Wall. After the wall comes down, Sasha asks Mundy to continue engaging in geopolitics with him, but Mundy- whose marriage has collapsed as a result of his secret life- refuses, and the two part ways. In the ensuing decade, Mundy moves to Germany and becomes a tour guide at
Linderhof Palace, begins dating a
Turkish refugee, and considers converting to
Islam to marry her and help raise her son. Following
9/11, Sasha resurfaces to tell Mundy that he's become involved in an organization to combat American military and industrial
globalization. Fearing that Sasha has been radicalized, Mundy is relieved to discover that he in fact wants Mundy to help him set up a
Socialist think-tank that will be financed by a Russian
oligarch with left-leaning sympathies. Initially excited to participate, Mundy becomes skeptical when he learns that he and Sasha's former
CIA contact is somehow involved in the scheme. Going to the schoolhouse one night, Mundy realizes too late that the boxes of books he and Sasha have been receiving in fact contain bomb-making materials and military grade weaponry; he and an arriving Sasha are both shot to death by a waiting American strike force. After their deaths, Sasha's past with the Stasi and Mundy's Islamic sympathies are used by the CIA and right-leaning American press outlets to portray them as
terrorists "with connections to
Al-Qaeda", in efforts to convince the German government to support the United States in its
war on terror. After Mundy's death, Amory, his controller from the British intelligence service during his espionage years, tries to publicize the truth, but slander by the British government results in his story being totally discredited. Mundy's girlfriend and her son are deported, and Germany enters the war on terror; per their wills, Mundy and Sasha are each buried beside their mothers in their respective home countries. ==Characters==