Author Description

When Jan inadvertently witnesses an assassination in his street, he is drawn into a recondite world of subterfuge and violence. Gangsters and arms dealers, who erroneously believe that he had dealings with the murdered man, beset him. The former wanted him to hand over a list of Swiss bank accounts and the latter to supply them with equipment the dead man had promised to provide. He can do neither, and the protection the police are able to offer him is far from adequate. The Dutch Security Service asks him to play along with the gangsters until they are caught. He reluctantly agrees. Then the CIA wants him to keep up the pretense of being able to supply the arms dealers with the equipment they are waiting for. He refuses, but becomes willy nilly involved in this as well. In the process, he falls in love with a reporter, whom he first met soon after the assassination he had witnessed. Being a mathematician working in a physics department, he could never shake off the feeling that during all his adventures he was like SchrAdinger's cat, alive and dead at one and the same time.