A German engineer arrives in Warsaw. Tonight he will be with his Polish mistress, tomorrow at a workers bar in the city's factory district to meet with Colonel Mercier in a backstreet cafe. Information is exchanged for money. Mercier loathes the niceties of ambassadorial lunches, cocktail parties and banquets of a world not yet at war, but one in which the drums of war can be heard ever more insistently in the background. However, they take on an altogether more interesting dimension when he meets the enigmatic and beautiful Anna Skarbek. While secretly observing panzer exercises in the Black Forest, Mercier sees a simple trick performed with a length of pipe strapped across a car and draws his own conclusions about exactly what it is the Germans are planning. When the Nazis find out what he's been doing, his own life becomes their target.
Warsaw 1938. French military attache Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier is also a spy on a mission, one which takes him undercover to Czechoslovakia on the trail of the elusive Chaika, a man who can lead him into the heart of the Nazi war machine. Back in Warsaw, his erstwhile mistress Anna Skarbek is devastated by news of her ex-lover and political refugee and journalist Max Mostov. Heartbroken, she flees to Spain on a League of Nations mission of mercy. As the Nazi storm clouds gather over Europe, dashing Polish Colonel Anton Pakulski undertakes his own mission, a mission that goes to the heart of protecting the very future of Poland itself.
