Mark Beamon, maverick FBI agent, has been given one last chance by the Bureau. Shunted into a job running a sleepy Southwest office, Beamon is under strict orders to shape up and do things 'by the book'—the FBI way. There's only one problem: Crime doesn't go by the book.

Flagstaff, Arizona, is shocked when a millionaire auto dealer and his wife are brutally murdered in an apparent botched robbery and kidnapping. It's one of the bloodiest, clumsiest crimes Beamon has ever seen. The missing teenage daughter, Jennifer Davis, who stands to inherit everything, is the prime suspect. Did she and her boyfriend fake her abduction?

The boyfriend has an alibi, and Beamon has a feeling. Something is not right about this case. With his new assistant in tow, and his new girlfriend all but forgotten, Beamon follows a trail of faint clues and strong hunches that lead from a remote Unabomber-type cabin in the Utah mountains, through the labyrinthine headquarters of the cultlike Church of the Evolution, into the shadowy, interlocking boardrooms of a high-tech communications empire.

Beamon has tossed the book aside again, and Washington is furious; for the church has powerful friends. Then a bombshell is dropped. The 'murder' of Jennifer's parents was a double suicide. But why? What did the Davises gain by killing themselves while their daughter watched? Are their deaths part of a morbid plot designed to bring America to its knees? Either way, time