Ghost from the Reich

– Summary In the ashes of 1944 Berlin, 25-year-old Robynne Reinhardt, a reluctant Abwehr officer of German-American heritage, receives a final desperate mission: secure Nazi uranium and V-2 secrets before the Red Army arrives. She makes a fateful choice—feeds partial intelligence to the Allies, triggering her mentor’s execution and her own partial defection. A scarred silver pocket watch, taken from her dying lover, becomes her lifelong talisman of lost time and betrayal.
Across four decades, Robynne evolves from wartime survivor to seasoned CIA/BND operative in divided Berlin. She builds fragile networks in the East, endures the 1953 uprising, helps plan the Berlin Tunnel, and barely escapes when the Wall rises overnight in 1961, losing loved ones in the wire. As a jaded handler through the Cold War’s iciest years—Prague Spring, mole hunts, Glienicke Bridge swaps—paranoia and personal fractures deepen; her own child is drawn into the game on the opposing side.
In 1989, as Gorbachev’s reforms unravel the GDR, Robynne races one last time: protecting buried assets, confronting an ancient Stasi adversary, and racing to prevent a final provocation. On November 9 she stands amid the candles and hammers as the Wall opens, then falls. In a bittersweet 1990 epilogue, she walks freely through the Brandenburg Gate—no longer a ghost, but a woman carrying the weight of every compromise in a reunited city. The watch, left behind, finally stops ticking.