Spanning fifty-six years, this is a savage fable of our times, almost of our hours. The friends of the title are Ted Mundy, British soldier's son, born in 1947 in a shining new, independent Pakistan, and Sasha, refugee son of an East German Lutheran pastor and his wife who have sought sanctuary in the West. The two men meet first as students in riot-torn West Berlin of the late 1960s, again in the grimy looking-glass of Cold War espionage and, most terribly, in today's unipolar world of terror, counter-terror and the war of lies.