When Suzanne Christie is widowed after fifteen years of a less than happy marriage, she decides to join a group tour, which takes her from Perth, in Western Australia, through east Asia to Japan and across the USSR by train, leaving the tour in East Berlin. At a ball she is introduced to Karl Schellenberg, an operative of the Stasi, the East German Department of State Security. Suzanne falls in love with him. Karl knows how strongly she is attracted to him, and he intends to spend her last night at her hotel in Berlin with her. When she realises that she is not willing to cooperate, he goes down to the hotel bar and returns to her room about midnight. She has forgotten to lock her door. She is almost asleep when he makes his presence and his intentions clear... But this encounter is not an end but a beginning. It keeps them together in ways that neither of them could have foreseen.