August 6, 1943: In his brief career in the Office of Strategic Services, twenty-four-year-old Cletus Frade has already been involved in a lot of unusual situations, but nothing like the one he's in now, standing with a German lieutenant colonel named Wilhelm Frogger in a Mississippi prisoner-of-war detention facility. Frade's job? To help Frogger escape so the OSS can use Frogger's knowledge and connections to kill Adolf Hitler.

In the aftermath of the surrenders of Germany and Japan in October 1945, Cletus Frade and his colleagues in the OSS are given the life-threatening task of maintaining security during a covert U.S. deal with Germany for intelligence about the identities of Soviet spies in the American atomic bomb program.