Johanna was beautiful, beguiling, cunning ... with a lust for wealth. She sought out the very rich plying the steamship lines from Italy to Argentina.

Konrad Ackermann was young, naive ... a former captain of the SS who abandoned Berlin as the Russian troops stormed the Führer bunker in April 1948.

Konrad Ackermann ... who financed his escape with a stash of solid gold coins, the Brotherhood coins minted by Martin Bormann to fund a resurgent German Fourth Reich. How he acquired them not even Colonel Otto Skorzeny knew.

Konrad Ackermann ... who Gela Pientka identified as the man who murdered Marianne.

In the chaos of a defeated Germany important people began to die as they sought refuge along the clandestine routes called ratlines between the ruins of Berlin and sanctuary in South America. Rumors spread of a fanatical SS officer, financed by stolen Nazi gold, who hunted those who abandoned their Führer in those dying days.

Was Konrad Ackermann this officer? Was he still alive?

The paths of the hunter and the hunted collided at Hotel Lancaster.