Onetime government agent Piet Hoffmann is on the run: both from the life prison sentence he escaped and from the Polish drug mafia he double-crossed. Only Hoffmann's handler, Erik Wilson, knows he now hides in Calí, Colombia, living under a false identity with his wife, Zofia, and sons Rasmus and Hugo.

But life on the run is precarious. And so when Hoffmann, in order to survive, accepts employment as a bodyguard and hit man for the Colombian cocaine mafia and is simultaneously approached by the US DEA to infiltrate the same cartel, he chooses to say yes to both. Hoffmann has a new, lucrative double life. However, Hoffmann's successful balancing act is short lived. When Timothy D Crouse, chairman of the US House of Representatives, is kidnapped while on a trip to Colombia, US forces settle on a new enemy for their next War on Terror. This gives the cartel and the US government the same problem: Piet Hoffmann.

Condemned and hung out to dry by both sides, Hoffmann is stranded. Yet help will come from the most unlikely of figures - the stubborn, acerbic Swedish detective who has doggedly tracked his whereabouts. DCI Ewert Grens - the enemy Hoffmann once tricked - will now become the only ally he can trust.