Lars Schelling runs a sushi-bar in Berlin in ca. 2001 that the Mafia finances. The Mafia wants its money back. Suddenly Lars's mother dies, and Lars himself gets followed and kidnapped. In fact, the Mafia has nothing to do with these latter events. It is rather former members of the East German state police. Lars's mother, it seems, had the documentation for a money laundering scam in the 1990s that funneled enormous sums from East German sources into a Swiss bank account for bribing government officials of the united Germany. The question is whether Lars learned the password to the Swiss lock box where the documentation is hidden before his mother's mysterious death. The press, East Germany's former state police, and Germany's legitimate police all want to know. The question driving the plot, however, is who belongs to which group, whether Lars really knows the password, and what he will do with what he knows and has.
