Late one balmy summer evening in Pyongyang, an important
Chinese intelligence general on his way to a secret meeting
with Kim Jon-Il is assassinated in plain sight of a
surveillance camera. The two shooters are wearing the
uniforms of North Korean police officers.
Kim Jong-Il denies any knowledge of the shooting, but the
Chinese do not believe him. As they prepare to attack,
Jong-Il promises to unleash his nuclear weapons on downtown
Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo, plunging the entire region into
nuclear war.
Kirk McGarvey, just off a difficult assignment that took him
to Mexico City, has returned to his visiting professorship
at the University of South Florida. A colonel in North
Korea's intelligence service shows up in person, asking
McGarvey to prove that North Korea did not authorize the hit.
It's the most extraordinary request McGarvey has ever
received. He enters a dangerous international shadow world
where almost nothing is as it seems. The puzzles lead him to
a mysterious Russian ex-KGB multimillionaire whose specialty
is expediting assassins for hire, to Pyongyang where he
finds the wedge to open up a far-reaching plot so monstrous
the entire world could go up into flames, and finally back
to the one nation that potentially has the most to gain by
such a war.