Three months after the Nazi regime declared unconditional surrender, the victorious political leaders met in the German city of Potsdam, just outside Berlin, for a post-war conference to discuss the new order in Europe. On 17 July 1945, Stalin and Truman sat down for an intimate lunch in one of the small banqueting suites inside the spectacular Cecilienhof Palace. The only people present were their respective foreign secretaries, Molotov and Byrnes, who acted as translators. Truman was astonished when Stalin disclosed that rumours of the discovery of Hitler and Braun’s bodies were fabricated and that a painstaking search by his Red Army soldiers of the Reich Chancellery grounds had failed to discover any sign of the Führer’s remains. Stalin was convinced Hitler had escaped his clutches.

Chapter One

6 January 2012

Buenos Aires

The tunnel was almost finished. It had taken three hugely determined men eight months to construct and ran straight from the basement of the Café Torino directly underneath the safe depository of the Banco Estero. The eminent bank was one of the oldest in Argentina and stood, imperiously, on Avenida Cabildo, deep in the heart of the fashionable Belgrano district of Buenos Aires in the north-east of the city. The hundred-foot tunnel had state-of-the-art ventilation, sensor-activated lighting and pure wool carpet flooring. The enormous underground structure was a magnificent feat of engineering. The small gang had worked every night and weekend for eight months and between them had moved over four thousand five hundred cubic feet of dirt, making nearly three thousand wheelbarrow trips.

Pedro García rested the drill by the side of the newly formed earth wall. He stopped chewing, carefully removed the gum from his mouth and stared up at the twelve-inch-thick concrete ceiling, appreciating they had finally reached the floor of the depository. Pedro allowed himself a rare smile as he stroked his straggly salt-and-pepper beard. He hadn’t shaved since the very first day the drilling had begun.

“Guys, this is it. We are standing directly underneath twelve hundred beautiful boxes and only God knows what’s inside them.”

One of his two comrades leapt across the shagpile carpet and bear-hugged his leader. “I’ll tell you what’s in them – new lives for all of us.” Ricardo Gonzales was the youngest of the three robbers and by far the most impetuous. “Pedro, you said we would do it and we have. I love you, old man.”

Ricardo was a stunning hulk of a man. He stood six foot six in his bare feet and his body was honed to within an inch of its life. When he wasn’t digging tunnels, he was working out seven days a week in his local gym and had done far more than his fair share when it came to heaving wheelbarrows full of dry earth.