Marathon Man

Thomas "Babe" Levy is a history Ph.D. student and an avid runner researching the same field as his father, H. V. Levy, who committed suicide after being investigated during the Joseph McCarthy era. Babe's brother, Henry "Doc" Levy, poses as an oil company executive, but is actually a government agent working for a secret agency headed by Commander Peter "Janey" Janeway. One of Doc's jobs is to serve as a diamond courier for the infamous Nazi war criminal Dr. Christian Szell, in return for the latter's assistance in tracking down other Nazi war criminals. Szell is known as der weiße Engel (German for The White Angel) due to his prominent mane of white hair. A wanted war criminal, Szell is ensconced in South America and is living off a large cache of diamonds which he had taken from Jews killed at Auschwitz. The diamonds are kept inside a safe deposit box at a bank in New York City and are withdrawn as needed by his brother Klaus Szell. After Dr. Szell's brother is killed in a fit of road rage, Szell feels that he cannot trust anybody anymore and proceeds to try to have all of the diamond handlers and couriers murdered, including Doc himself.