A novel of decline, redemption, violence, love and loss. Virgil Conlan lives in a violent world. He is an environmental terrorist, although the description would bother him, for he sees himself as the protector of the world's beauty. He also knows he has a destiny he cannot escape. The story is the biographer's exploration of a man: rude, sexist, domineering, at times almost mystical, a contrary man, and yet capable of extraordinary tenderness, inter spaced with four action chapters in which he successfully sabotages an off-shore mining dredge in the Chilean islands, wrecks a destructive mining operation in the Rocky Mountains, and brings a logging operation to a halt in British Columbia. It is also a love story, and culminates violently in a contracted attempt on Conlan's life, and his return to Chile to finish the uncompleted job: his rendezvous at the disputed barricade.