Noah had longed for adventure all his life, and he wasn't about to let a stodgy history professor do him out of the story of his life with his complaining and heel-dragging. Robert had seen more than he cared to of adventure in his years in the European theater for the CIA. Now he had a nicely boring career as a news agency historical fact researcher, a brownstone full of family antiques, and a quiet, dignified life. He wasn't about to let Noah Taylor, with his campy, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants ways, blow it for him. Robert Tate, 36, with a background of culture and family wealth, seems to be content using his doctorate in European history to do historical perspectives and analysis for The McNaughton News Corporation, a New York based international wire news service, . Formerly with the Special Forces in Afghanistan, and the CIA's European theater, he left intrigue and danger behind and now keeps up his inherited townhouse and antiques with the salary from his job at McNaughton. Noah Taylor, 24, is the arts and fashion researcher at McNaughton News. He is self-confident, new-age, hip and seeking to get as far from his Mississippi white-trash roots as possible. He did whatever was necessary to put himself through school and how he looked for a way to break out of the research department into investigative journalism. He was out and proud and not afraid to express himself. These two very different characters are thrown together by McNaughton News to investigate the spectacular theft from a Kremlin museum of the last Imperial Easter egg, called the Abdication Egg, made by the famous House of Faberge jewelers for the last Tsar of All the Russias, Nicholas II."