When in March 1938 Germany invades Austria, all anti-Nazis are immediately rounded up and imprisoned. Prominent amongst these is liberal editor Johann Fehrbach, his Anglo-Irish wife, and his two daughters. But the elder of the girls, seventeen-year-old Annaliese, is separated from her parents and taken into Gestapo custody.

It's June 1941, and the low point of the war. England throws wave after wave of RAF bombers across the Channel, but somehow the Luftwaffe is able to shoot them down at will. The skies, indeed, the war itself seem to belong to Hitler.

“In wartime,” Winston Churchill wrote, “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” For Britain’s counterintelligence operations, this meant finding the unlikeliest agent imaginable - a history professor named Alfred Vicary, handpicked by Churchill himself to expose a highly dangerous, but unknown, traitor. The Nazis, however, have also chosen an unlikely agent.

1942: World War II is in full swing. Odette Sansom decides to follow in her war hero father’s footsteps by becoming an SOE agent to aid Britain and her beloved homeland, France. Five failed attempts and a plane crash later, she finally lands in occupied France to begin her mission. It is here that she meets her commanding officer, Captain Peter Churchill. As they successfully complete mission after mission, Peter and Odette fall in love. All the while, they are being hunted by the cunning German secret police sergeant, Hugo Bleicher, who finally succeeds in capturing them.

Paul Schumann, a German American living in New York City in 1936, is a mobster hitman known as much for his brilliant tactics as for taking only "righteous" assignments. But then Paul gets caught. And the arresting officer offers him a stark choice: prison or covert government service. Paul is asked to pose as a journalist covering the summer Olympics taking place in Berlin. He's to hunt down and kill Reinhard Ernst - the ruthless architect of Hitler's clandestine rearmament.

Four years of horrific fighting have finally ended on the battlefield, but in the spring of 1919, Paris is filled with delegates from around the world who are still trying to hammer out the terms of peace. One such delegate is British diplomat Sir Henry Maxted, in charge of liaising with Brazilians regarding seized ships. But before a deal is reached, Sir Henry turns up dead outside a Montparnasse apartment building, apparently having fell from the roof.

1940. Hitler’s terrifying war machine will soon roll through England, and in its wake Hitler plans to enthrone puppet monarchs under Nazi control. For these roles he demands none other than the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Berlin. Brilliant SS officer Walter Schellenberg is ordered to “persuade” the Duke and Duchess to the Nazi cause. But when Shellenberg impulsively aids the escape of beautiful Jewish nightclub singer Hannah Winter, he plunges them both into a dark arena of intrigue and betrayal.

D-Day is approaching. They don’t know where or when, but the Germans know it’ll be soon, and for Felicity "Flick" Clariet, the stakes have never been higher. A senior agent in the ranks of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) responsible for sabotage, Flick has survived to become one of Britain’s most effective operatives in Northern France. She knows that the Germans’ ability to thwart the Allied attack depends upon their lines of communications, and in the days before the invasion, no target is of greater strategic importance than the largest telephone exchange in Europe.

Former allies in the IRA, Sean Dillon and Martin Brosnan have chosen different paths. Now Dillon is a terrorist for hire, a master of disguise employed by Saddam Hussein. Brosnan is the one man who knows Dillon’s strengths and weaknesses…and brilliant mastery of espionage. Once friends, now enemies, they are playing the deadliest game of their careers. A game that culminates in a frightening - and true - event: Iraq’s attempted mortar attack on the British war cabinet at 10 Downing Street in February 1991.

October, 1962, in Cuba: Soviet ships off-load what intelligence reveals to be nuclear missiles. In Washington, President Kennedy and his advisers are in furious debate over how long they can wait to discover what the Soviets intend before dropping the first bomb. And, in Ithaca, New York, Margo Jensen - a 19-year-old Cornell sophomore - is swept up in a bizarre concatenation of circumstances that will make of her the back-channel liaison between Soviet Premier Khrushchev and Kennedy.

SS Obersturmführer Paul Meissner arrives in Auschwitz from the Russian front wounded and fit only for administrative duty. His most pressing task is to improve camp morale, so he establishes a chess club and allows officers and enlisted men to gamble on the games. Soon Meissner learns that chess is also played among the prisoners, and there are rumors of an unbeatable Jew known as "the Watchmaker".

On a state visit to Moscow, Billie Bradford, the beautiful and brilliant wife of the President of the United States, is abducted by the Soviets and replaced by Vera Vazilova, a superbly trained Russian undercover agent and actress who is the First Lady's physical double. The impostor's mission - to induce the President to reveal a U.S. secret that will drastically tip the world balance toward Russia. But one false move - whether before TV cameras or in the White House bedroom - can destroy the entire masquerade.

Veteran con artist Roy spots an obvious easy mark when he meets Betty, a wealthy widow, online. In no time at all, he's moved into Betty's lovely cottage and is preparing to accompany her on a romantic trip to Europe. Betty's grandson disapproves of their blossoming relationship, but Roy is sure this scheme will be a success. He knows what he's doing. As this remarkable feat of storytelling weaves together Roy's and Betty's futures, it also unwinds their pasts.

In the fall of 1940, the Nazis are at the height of their power. France is occupied, Britain is enduring the Blitz and is under threat of invasion, America is neutral, and Russia is in an uneasy alliance with Germany. Stephen Metcalfe is a well-known man about town in occupied Paris. He's also a minor asset in the U.S.'s secret intelligence forces in Europe. Through a wild twist of fate, it falls to Metcalfe to instigate a bold plan that may be the only hope for what remains of the free world.

England, 1947: A young woman finds herself under close observation in an insane asylum, charged with a violent crime she has no memory of committing. As she tries to make sense of her recent past, she recalls very little. But she still remembers wartime in Yugoslavia. There she and her lover risked everything to carry out dangerous work resisting the Germans - a heroic campaign in which many brave comrades were lost. After that, the trail disappears into confusion. How did she come to be trapped in a living nightmare?