At the docks on the Isle of Cyprus, Alexei Kolyenko pictures the impact of a nuclear bomb on the unsuspecting populace. Though he cannot yet build such a bomb, he awaits the day when he can set off bombs in major cities. He believes God willed him to exact punishment on what he terms “inferior races,” believing that immigrants and refugees are coming into Europe “by the millions, leaving their own wretched countries behind to ruin others” and steal “jobs that should have gone to real people” (67). To stop the immigrants from coming in, he intends to wipe them out in their home countries.

He believes that God has twice pointed him in the right direction. The first was two years earlier when he met an old Russian KGB spy in a bar, who told him a drunken story about catching an American spy who revealed the secret of Einstein’s equation, Pandora. Furthermore, the KGB spy believed Pandora was hidden at Einstein’s old home in Bern, Switzerland, now a museum, but was too old to find it himself.

Alexei and his friends—other white European men with similar views who call themselves Das Furii (the Furies in German)—went to Bern to find Pandora.