It all begins innocently enough when a stubborn fire at a tire recycling plant in a small, upstate New York town results in the death of a seven-year-old boy living a mile away. This seemingly innocuous little story takes a sudden twist when the boy's grief-stricken father arrives. Damon Alexander is part of the agency for Select Environmental Tactical Analysis. SETA is a government group with the job of monitoring environmental problems - both natural and man made - all over the world. Calling upon his SETA training and well honed instincts, "Alex" quickly concludes that there is no logical reason that inhaling the smoke from the fire should have killed his son. Though told by his colleagues to take an extended vacation, he begins his own investigation into the source of the fire, an investigation that will ultimately lead him into an ever-widening circle of conspiracy, treachery, deception, and danger, as well as a race against time to stop the execution of a plan that could put the entire population of the greater New York area in mortal danger. Aided by his longtime SETA partner, Jake Dunnock, Alex uses every resource he can muster to seek a potentially devastating chemical weapon thought long destroyed after its experimental use in the Vietnam War. Along the way, he calls in a debt owed him by a powerful mob boss, uncovers new evidence about death of a prominent politician decades earlier, discovers a web of corruption in a well-respected major American corporation, and learns that operatives of a deposed foreign government, thought to be out of existence, are active once again. This is a story that could easily happen in today's world, where the elements of politics, greed, and the lust for power are all put into an explosive caldron that is already sizzling with the deadly ToxiCon-14.