He soon has two goals: one personal, one professional. The personal goal is to see if his lover from before the war, Lena Brandt, the wife of a brilliant mathematician, is still alive. The professional one is to figure out who killed a soldier who was on the same incoming flight as Geismar, and whose body washes up on the shore of a lake in Potsdam during the Churchill-Stalin-Truman peace conference, his uniform stuffed with Russian money.