Day of judgment - Jack Higgins (First edition; Simon Vaughn #3)

The Vatican wanted to save him. President Kennedy, about to visit West Berlin in 1963, wanted to save him. The girl who had betrayed him to the East Germans, herself the daughter of a traitor, wanted to save him. So did one of the heads of West German Intelligence, and his former opponent on the British side. What man could motivate the same urge for so many different reasons, political and personal? Only someone extraordinary.

The extraordinary man was Father Sean Conlin, a frail, stubborn, old Irishman, staunch opponent of Communism, who for years had smuggled refugees to the West. Now the East Germans had him in an impregnable fortress fifty miles inside the border, and they were intent on making him recant publicly in time to ruin Kennedy's goodwill visit.

Arrayed against him was the world’s leading specialist in ‘thought reform’, alias brainwashing: Harry van Buren, once American, now anti all things American, whose victims always ended by agreeing with him — if they lived. Would Conlin? Or would the strangely assorted team intent on his rescue get through to him in time?

It included six Lutheran monks and an American Jesuit; an ex-Luftwaffe ace and an English major with the unenviable nickname of ‘The Beast of Selangor’; a Jewish undertaker and the ex-SS caretaker of the prison fortress. Not all of them would survive.

Who lived, who died, who talked and who kept silent, make a story of racking suspense, in which international events and personal crises are fused by Jack Higgins into a spellbinding whole.