Claus Reiter(Gerd Anthoff) can’t believe his eyes when he enters his office to find a former colleague sitting at his desk: Thomas Sell (Christoph Waltz) was chief inspector of the white-collar crime squad and Reiter’s main rival for the position of head of the commissioner’s office. 13 years ago, Sell was arrested for murder. The investigating officer from the murder squad was Claus Reiter. Now, just released from prison, Sell alleges that Reiter had deliberately mixed up the facts in the case against him so as to eliminate him from the running for promotion. Reiter gives a forced laugh at the suggestion, but Thomas Sell is so convinced that Reiter’s job is rightfully his that he has handcuffed himself to Reiter’s office chair. Sell’s acrimony becomes all the more apparent when he explains that after his conviction his wife broke off all contact and he hasn’t seen his son in 13 years.
The incident immediately arouses Eva Maria Prohacek‘s (Senta Berger) and André Langner‘s (Rudolf Krause) curiosity: Thomas Sell was convicted of murdering Sabine Pfeiffer, an agent from the labor office who had been looking for traces of illegal jobbers on a construction site, in 1993 while investigating a ring of Czech moonlighters. The investigators start making inquiries into the grave accusations against their superior. This prompts Reiter to take sick leave so that he cannot officially be furloughed. Sell, who in his previous investigations into the illicit construction mafia had himself slipped deeper and deeper into illegality, leads the investigators to Pavel Moucha (Jevgenij Sitochin), the "Fly".
