The Trade Commissioner

As Trade Commissioner for Sweden with responsibility for trade development with Northwestern USA and Western Canada, Eric Stark learns through his secretary Eva that a German on his invitation list for a wine tasting party at the end of the 1960’s had been one of Hitler’s aides-de-camp during the entire second world war.

When learning from his old friend at La Sûreté in Paris that one of his business contacts in USA, a French aeronautical engineer with the executive position Foreign Procurement Manager for a major US space and aircraft corporation, was suspected to have been a collaborator with the Nazis during the war, Eric Stark decides to extort a confirmation of that suspicion from the German by letting him understand that he, Eric Stark, is informed about his gruesome past at the side of the Führer. When the German then gets the requested confirmation from a former SS officer in Germany who handled the collaborators in Paris and passes that on, Eric Stark senses he could use that information to develop a partnership with the Frenchman for technology transfers to Moscow, Beirut and Beijing – a power brokerage business to contribute to the maintenance of the balance of terror between the major world powers and thus reduce the risk for a third world war.

The outraged German decides to undertake any measures, including murder, to prevent public disclosure of his grisly past.

However, Eric Stark succeeds to survive the attempts on his life and can implement his greater scheme together with the Frenchman resulting in huge brokerage fees channeled through Swiss number-accounts to Cayman Islands for investments in a daring diamond joint venture with an English consortium, all based on the newly discovered diamond deposits in Siberia.