When a young woman vanishes without a trace, former special agent Cleo North is hired to find her. But cold trail after cold trail lead to nowhere, until Major Jack Donovan—special agent with the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations and the on-again, off-again man in Cleo's life—joins the case. Soon they are trying to determine why a lowly employee had access to engineering schematics of a ship carrying dangerous cargo. When the evidence leads them to Malta, they uncover a massive threat with international consequences. Absolutely nothing is as it seems—and time is running out for them to find the key to a terrorist's deeply hidden sins.