The Dollar Compass
Supercomputers, Power Politics, and Moral Deception in the Autumn of the Cold War. A gripping tale of ideals, temptation, and moral decay as the stakes rise.
Henrik Bertelsen is walking a dangerous tightrope: sales manager at a struggling American tech company, father of two young children, and ambitious amateur musician.
At home in their co-housing community, his wife, Sammy, is fighting to find herself again after maternity leave while juggling a demanding management job that clashes with Henrik’s relentless travel schedule.
When Gorbachev launches glasnost and Reagan responds with a bold new strategy, Henrik is dispatched to Moscow to secure the billion-dollar contract that could save his company.
But behind the polished smiles and lofty speeches lie hidden agendas, fierce rivalries, bribery, and moral deception.
The Dollar Compass is a tense and thought-provoking Cold War thriller about how minor compromises can escalate into great betrayals—and how far a person can go before losing themselves.
Villy’s walnut schnapps
“Bech writes like a man who has tasted both vodka and Villy’s walnut schnapps—and still stands upright. A perfect armchair travel companion.”
– Henning Damkiær
A Genre of its Own
“An exciting novel that feels like a genre of its own—entertaining, thought-provoking, and beautifully written. I was hooked from page one.”
– Tine Curtis
Caught in the Middle
“Caught between American and Soviet values, Henrik’s story is a Cold War novel like no other—where private life, business, and politics intertwine.”
– Rikke Sommer
Copenhagen, late summer, 1985.
Enter one Henrik Bertelsen – a civil servant turned computer salesman, and an unlikely emissary of Western industry – who finds himself dispatched, by circumstance and superior instruction, behind the Iron Curtain. His brief? To explore the feasibility of selling American supercomputing technology to the Soviet
energy sector. A proposition that, mere months prior, would have been dismissed as the stuff of diplomatic fantasy.
