The Spies Of Warsaw: Season 1

Widowed Jean-Francois Mercier is a spy posing as a military atttache in the French embassy in Warsaw in 1937. Leading a double life he may escort League of Nations lawyer Anna Skarbek,girlfriend of Russian emigre Maxim Mostov to a lavish function one night but next day he will be liaising with agent Edvard Uhl,an engineer in a tank factory who brings him blue-prints for a new German tank. Then at night he will lead a covert band investigating secret German tank trials in the forest. The Germans are suspicious of Uhl but he dies before they can arrest him. They do however kill Olga,a bogus countess and spy who introduced Uhl to Mercier. After Mercier is almost caught photographing the tank operations he seeks a new contact in Dr Lapp,a non-Nazi sympathiser who works for a pharmaceutical company. He also begins an affair with Anna. Having helped two elderly Jewish spies to escape Mercier himself becomes increasingly under suspicion by the occupying Germans and,as he goes to put flowers on Olga's grave,is bundled into a car at gunpoint.

Mercier escapes his German captors and travels to Czechoslovakia to meet the contact the elderly Rozens - whom he helped to defect - gave him,Professor Julius Halbach. Having being given money and a Swiss passport Halbach arranges for Mercier to meet the double agent Chaika, Johannes Elter,a Gestapo officer who gives him details of Germany's planned invasion of France. Mercier is rewarded by his superiors with promotion and a home in Paris. He rings Anna to join him but she refuses as Maxim has been deported and she blames her liaison with Mercier. After hosting a dinner in Paris for his sister Gabrielle and her pianist boy-friend he has to move the Rozens to the coast after he has killed two gunmen after them. He returns to Warsaw and suggests to Dr Lapp that Chaika is supplying deliberately wrong information. That night he kills an intruder in his flat and believes Lapp betrayed him. Some months later he discovers that Maxim lied,he was not deported at all, a fact which brings Anna back to Mercier. In 1939 the Nazis invade Poland and Mercier and Anna board a train bound for Romania,the train also carrying the Polish bullion reserve to save it from the Germans. The train is attacked by Ukrainian bandits but they are routed and the train steams on to the border and safety.

The fourth part of Alan Furst's celebrated spy novel set in Poland, Paris and Berlin in the years leading up to the Second World War and starring David Tennant and Janet Montgomery.