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Police officers Kessel and Driller are supposed to be on the lookout for an internationally wanted war criminal. But Kessel is a junkie, gets into a fight with a young dealer and runs the man over. His colleague Driller covers all the tracks, but cannot prevent an ambitious public prosecutor from trying to solve the incident. However, the two of them have a much bigger problem: the crime has made Kessel vulnerable to blackmail.
A night-time chase. The dealers in their off-road vehicle are sweating bullets, because Diller and Kessel have them in their sights. A routine operation for the well-rehearsed duo, long-time friends who have always had each other's backs. And at the moment, Kessel is in dire need of Diller's support: his daughter suffers from severe epilepsy, her treatment is expensive and his marriage is in danger of falling apart. But Kessel knows he can rely on Diller and he loves his wife. So he is sure that everything will be fine. And suddenly an opportunity arises to help fate along: With a bag full of drugs, which Kessel discovers in the car of the fugitive dealers. Kessel hesitates only briefly and then lets them go. But instead of solving his problems, this bag plunges him into new, far greater conflicts - and takes his partner Diller and his family with him.
Diller and Kessel, two hardened Hamburg investigators, learn that their "old buddy" Mohammed is planning to rob a bank with his buddies. Kessel is a customer there, of all places. Kessel is divorced because of previous drug problems, but has resolved to win Claire and the children back and has therefore been clean for months. Despite Kessel's warning to the branch manager, the gangsters carry out their plan and take a hostage who happens to be there: Kessel's daughter Ruby, who suffers from epilepsy.
Three years after his conviction for drug trafficking, Erich Kessel is about to be released from prison. It's a particularly trying time for this addiction-free former narcotics officer, whose seriously ill daughter has just died. With his wife, Claire, ready to give him a second chance after years of separation, and his former colleague and friend, Superintendent Mario Diller, having found him a job as a bartender, Kessel is determined to prove himself beyond reproach. But shortly before his release, the double murder of a young drug dealer and his fiancée, daughter of the powerful Syrian crime boss Walid Schukri, threatens to ruin his fine promises. The latter, who is serving a long sentence alongside Kessel, offers him a handsome sum to catch his daughter's killer. For the former commissioner, now broke, the temptation is great to accept this juicy contract, the ultimate investigation on the frontier of legality.