CIA Agent, Trevor Lloyd, is furious when he is called in from the field to a desk job at CIA Headquarters in Langley and he lets Margaret Ames, his new boss, know it. Ames has a point to prove as the first female head of the CIA and isn't taking any guff from Lloyd and assigns him to a routine investigation with FBI Agent Terri Summers, who has yet to get her feet wet. It is late 1999 and the Light Stream Technologies computers have been compromised, spy satellites are being destroyed, and the Defense Department is covering it up. The investigation leads to NASA and an international conspiracy to bring the United States into a nuclear war with Russia. In their effort to unravel the conspiracy, Lloyd and Summers are led to an obscure company in California and a secret weapon that an enemy desperately wants; a weapon that the U.S. Congress has defunded, but secretly, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the U.S. Space Command, and the U.S. Air Force, all part of the Strategic Defense Initiative have continued to fund. The result of that program is the most destructive weapon the world has ever known? The Light Stream Laser. But there are those within the government who have promised another, more conventional, means of protecting the world from nuclear disaster, and they will do anything to prevent Light Stream Technologies from launching their new weapon. Lloyd and Summers are on a run for their lives from foreign enemies, as well as some within their own government. They need to survive long enough to save the world from a devastating nuclear war.