The fifth volume of The Lanny Budd Saga was written in 1944 and covers the period 1937–1938. In 1937, for Lanny Budd, a chance meeting in New York dramatically changed his fate. Appointed as Presidential Agent 103, an international art dealer receives a secret mission and is sent back to the Third Reich. His reports sound alarming in connection with the onset of fascism and Nazism and the fall of the democratically elected government of Spain and the plunder of Abyssinia by Mussolini. All the terror unleashed by Franco, Mussolini and Hitler is financed by rich and powerful industrialists and financiers. They support these scum of humanity, believing that they can protect them from the Red Menace or Bolshevism. These European plutocrats are more afraid of the Reds than of their countries being taken over by fascism and Nazism. He witnesses a conspiracy of the Cagulars (French fascists) in France. Watches as the Allied powers prepare to cede Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in a futile attempt to avoid war, as the Munich Agreement was reached, which served as a prologue to World War II. The woman Lanny loves falls into the cruel hands of the Gestapo, and he will risk everything to save her. The volume consists of seven books and thirty-one chapters.