Western world Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA’s network of secure houses, uncommon havens amidst the dangerous milieu of the city in the grips of the Cold War. Helen’s globe is usually upended when she overhears a gathering between two different people speaking a coded language that tips at shadowy realities significantly beyond her understanding. Before the day has gone out, she witnesses another unauthorized encounter. Her efforts to expose the dark truths in what she has observed provides about repercussions that reach across decades and continents in to the current, when, in Maryland, a young man is arrested for the double murder of his parents, and his sister requires it upon herself to learn why he did it.