Inthe hot summer months of 1939 as Europe edges ever closer to war, an American writer, Adam Howard, is struggling to survive in Paris as a script doctor -- this time for a French producer whose ambition is to make one last picture before war and, he fears, the Wehrmacht come to France. Adam's life takes a dramatic turn when a Hollywood producer signs him to script Etienne Morel's latest novel. When they meet, Morel asks Adam toreplace a departed fellow American as keeper of the key to a safe-deposit box containing incriminating microfilm of clandestine Soviet activities during the recent civil war in Spain.The microfilm is the only thing preventing Morel from being liquidated by Soviet agents. Adam soon finds himself plunged into a forbidding universe of German spies, Soviet hit-squads and shifting identities. Along the way he meets Sasha Tradescu, a mysterious and alluring Romanian who works at a German-Dutch filmstudio outside Paris, and Morel's even more alluring niece, Luce de Castellane, who eventually shelters him from pursuingSoviet agents-- before events lead to a deadly climax in a rain-swept wood above the Seine.