The Berlin Assignment

This story of discovery, romance, and intrigue is set in Berlin shortly after the fall of the Wall. Anthony Hanbury, a Canadian diplomat pursuing a desultory career, is assigned as consul to Berlin. Having lived in Berlin as a student during the sixties, he asks for this assignment twenty-five years later to renew contact both with the city - gripped by the tumultuous changes of German reunification - and with people he once knew. On the surface Hanbury’s assignment unfolds routinely. Behind the scenes, however, his activities generate forces of suspicion. Only in the new Berlin - where the Wall is gone but East-West divisions continue, where the Cold War’s remnants linger and a totalitarian regime’s entrails are available for scavenging - could Hanbury’s fate take the calamitous tu it does. Bracketing the story is Hanbury’s previous boss, Irving Heywood, a man with a zest for Service gossip. In a position of influence at headquarters in Ottawa and piqued by the Berlin events, he unwillingly becomes an agent in the consul’s mysterious downfall.