Mary Ariza, a beautiful, savvy lawyer, knows all the ins and outs of the law and the lawless. Nothing that anyone can do and try to get away with can make her blink. But now, as she stops to help a man having a heart attack on the street, she unknowingly marks herself for death. Vice Inspector Jack Kordic, a cop's cop, has handled every rough assignment from rape and murder to blazing shoot-outs. But when he discovers that the headless, handless corpse floating in the icy Pacific is somehow linked to Mary Ariza, he is thrust into the same nightmare. What neither knows is that they have been pushed in the path of an international assassin they cannot see. Known as The Conductor, his mission is to kidnap a San Francisco billionaire, and to do so, he must commit a crime of unthinkable proportions.