chunk: The preface of the novel consists of two real-life newspaper articles from 1975 about terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as "Carlos the Jackal."
  The story opens with gunfire on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea. One man is cast into the waves before the boat explodes, and is later picked up by fishermen, who find him clinging to debris. They also find he is suffering from amnesia, apparently as a result of a traumatic head injury, with occasional erratic intrusions or flashbacks to the past, but is unable to make sense of them. The only definite evidence of his former life is a small film negative found embedded in his hip containing the information required to access a bank account in Zurich.