The Quito assignment was meant to be a milk run for Special Agent Maggie de la Cruz: just hand over the two-million-dollar payoff and get the signatures of a corrupt oil minister and two oil-company bigwigs. Then stand back while the arrests are made. But that's not quite how things play out. When the sting is sabotaged and Minister Beltran wants the two million anyway, Maggie says no. Bullets fly. And Maggie has to run. Back home in the U.S., licking her wounds, Maggie learns that Minister Beltran has just been kidnapped by a deadly eco-terrorist group protecting the Amazon jungle from oil drilling. The Agency's covert-operations section needs to send Maggie back to South America, along with Field Agent John Rae Hutchens, to rescue Beltran for, ironically, another two million. Another milk run? Maybe--if everyone involved doesn't have a secret agenda. Events continue to go off-kilter: the suspicious detainment of a field agent at Bogotá International, leaving Maggie on her own; terrorists who seem more interested in the payoff money than the cause; case handlers with shadowy links that can't be easily explained; and worse. But Agent de la Cruz must deal with it. Any way she can.