Amsterdam, July 2012. In the heart of the night in the offices of a Dutch company called Seleksoft, specializing in the development of algorithms and software for the encryption of sensitive data, an expert analyst is killed.
Nine months later, at Chatillon-sur-Marne, Champagne, the accountant of the Priory of Binson falls to his death at dawn from the belltower. It seems to be a suicide but the explanation does not convince Inspector Legrand who leaves immediately for Marseille, the accountant’s home town. However, Inspector Legrand’s investigation and his life will be halted forever within just a few hours. This adds up to three deaths and no connections between them. Legrand, however, was an old friend of François Gerard, the commissioner of the French intelligence arm DCRI. A melancholy man who lives with his two rescue dogs, Gerard is immediately on the case searching for the assassin in Marseille at the very moment when Ernst Jan Derrek, the police inspector from Amsterdam, asks him to lend a hand with the Seleksoft case.

A further homicide in Marseille, that of a drug dealer, will provide the connection between the death of Binson and that of the analyst of Seleksoft.
In the middle of it all is Sahar, a beautiful, young Tunisian woman who fled from the Ben Alì regime together with her fiancé, Farid. Their great love story has begun to fade and the paths of Sahar and François Gerard will now cross.

For completely different reasons it turns out that they are chasing the same target. It will be Sahar, from her hospital bed in Zagreb, who furnishes Gerard with the information he needs to keep the celebrations planned for the entry of Croatia in the EU from turning into a widespread tragedy.