Mörderische Jagd (2013)

Former police officer and current private investigator Finn Zehender receives a lucrative assignment arranged for him by his girlfriend, Agnes Sonntag. He is supposed to protect two teenagers because their father has come under the scrutiny of an organized crime group. According to Agnes’s research, Diego Vargas, the group’s clan leader, has already hired two hitmen to target Urs Jäger. Immediately after Zehender’s first conversation with his client, the client is the target of a bombing, whereupon the detective hurriedly leaves the estate with the two teenagers, Mathilda and Moritz, to get them to safety. With no plan, he takes them to Aschberg and leaves them in the care of former village police officer Gerhard Mühlfellner, because he wants to visit Agnes again. On the way back, he realizes that not only Diego Vargas but also the BND are after the children, because they are supposedly the key to a list of tax evaders. Vargas wants to use the list for blackmail, while the BND is trying to prevent the names on it from being made public; some of them belong to high-ranking politicians. After a car chase with Diego’s hitmen, Zehender promptly seeks refuge with the teenagers at a police station. The officer in charge refuses to believe the detective’s story, but the two hitmen also turn up at the station, start a shootout, and kill the police officer and his colleague. Although Zehender manages to get his protégés out of the building unharmed, they soon fall into the hitmen’s hands, and the men bundle them into their car and take them away. They try every means to find out from the teenagers where the list is hidden, but since the two know nothing about this mysterious list, they have nothing to tell the hitmen. To get Mathilda to talk, one of the hitmen pretends that he has shot Moritz. Meanwhile, Zehender tries another way to obtain a clue to the list’s hiding place. He finds leads pointing to a church in a small village. By the time he arrives, the hitmen and Mathilda are already there, searching for the hiding place. Zehender resorts to a trick and secretly plants a USB stick on a gravestone. He then confronts the hitmen and offers them the list’s hiding place in exchange for Urs Jäger’s children. Diego’s hitmen are indeed satisfied with the data storage device they find and withdraw. Finn Zehender eventually manages to find the real list, which Jäger had hidden in an image file in the form of digital check bits. Since the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution fears that the list could endanger the German government, the detective has to hand over the list of names. Nevertheless, he gives the press several names he was able to remember thanks to his photographic memory, prompting numerous politicians and business executives to announce their resignations.