Perhaps it was ordained that Louis Schweitzer, who had for twenty years been a quiet, orderly man—a translator for the international organization Europahaus—should have been bicycling through the sunny pasture at the moment the man in the ditch croaked out "Thirst."

Louis found the source of the feeble voice, a man in pain, whose life was beginning to ebb, a man much out of place in that rural setting, lying face down in a ditch in city clothes. A man in trouble—how bad the trouble was Louis didn't realize at once, but he had recognized him as a Russian. The man refused Louis' help; instead ordered him to go to a nearby quince tree and dig in its roots.

Louis was down on one knee digging when something made him look up. A second man was standing there, smiling and pointing a pistol at him. If the man had shot Louis at once, hadn't taken the time to enjoy smiling at him, a Louis who had been dead for twenty years wouldn't have come back to life, wouldn't have left the pistol-holding man with two neat holes in his head.

And wouldn't have found the buried silver box—and in it the Dresden Green, all forty carats of it.

Dresden—Louis' nightmare. Dresden—destroyed in a rain of fire—and only the Green survived. The Dresden Green, and with it Louis' quiet life, splintered into danger.