If Kurt Wenzel had not turned up in troubled post-war Trieste, there would have been no problem. Surgeon Eugen Reichenbach would have continued his placid, respectable life as a naturalised American with the World Universities Relief Organisation. But when crafty Kurt challenged him with, ‘If you were asked to perform an operation tonight you’d be frightened out of your wits,’ Eugen knew only too well that he could not refuse. It was in this way that Reichenbach began the journey that would lead him to the darkness of an isolated farmhouse where a man lay desperately ill, with a bullet in his lung and the police of several nations at his heels. When Eugen discovered the identity of the patient, it was too late to turn back. Blackmailed into a a fight for the outlaw’s life, Reichenbach is also cut off from the protection of law and order.