Helpless, the young convent student Richard has to watch as his mother Sarazenin Zobeida is condemned by the inquisitor Heinrich Institoris as a witch and burned at the stake. From then on, Richard swears revenge on Institoris for what he did to his family. He can escape and is taken by the merchant Jakob Fugger. He wants to teach him not only to seek blind revenge, but to manipulate people like puppets and thus to reach his goals. The two travel from Florence to Rome to influence the upcoming election of the pope and to witness the power struggle between the Medicis and the Borgias up close.
ZERV" tells of the first years after the fall of the Wall, the breaks in life courses, of completely different biographies and of the successful coming together in the common fight against crime, which knows no East and West. ZERV stands for the Central Investigation Office for Government and Association Crime, founded in Berlin in 1991 by decision of the federal government.
It all begins when the wealthy real estate shark Gordon Stuart (Albert Lieven) is murdered in a lonely villa by his wife Diana (Ingmar Zeisberg) and his closest collaborator Mark Paxton (Peter Eschberg). When Mark wants to get rid of the corpse, it suddenly disappears. A nerve-wracking game of "cat and mouse" turns the perpetrators into victims. Inspector Clay (Horst Bollmann) investigates and soon stumbles across more corpses
Janet Freeman (Gaby Jaeger), the daughter of the English nuclear researcher Clive (Jürgen Goslar) and his wife Lucy (Eva-Ingeborg Scholz), is kidnapped