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.