William 'Ace' Soule and his partner, Vic Varell, a pair of detectives with a nameless company and 'Trudy', an extraordinary VSA lie detector that cannot be beaten, had been making a living doing pre-employment screenings for mid-sized companies. After a quick, effective job for the Office of Nuclear Energy, the ONE Security Director, pleased with their previous work, allows Soule to pick a job from the ONE's Unresolved Cases. He selects Case 2012-0714. Case 2012-0714 concerns CONFOREX, a politically and militarily strategic project so secret, a Level Nine security clearance can't get Varell access. After successful testing, inventor Doctor Allen Everett Sheffield vacations in Paris before hosting a world demonstration in New York. While there in the company of a French prostitute, he disappears from his security detail for the final six of his twelve weeks. His behavior upon returning to America alarms his partner, Doctor Donna Evicci, liaison sponsor from the Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee. Teaming with Varell and Soule, the three of them attempt to discover what, if anything, happened to Sheffield during his missing six weeks. It appears that this will be laughingly simple for them with the aid of 'Trudy'. Until field operator Varell returns from Manhattan with a recorded interview of Sheffield that 'Trudy' cannot decipher. With enough details to realize that they may be facing a horrific catastrophe, but without enough solid proof to convince the ONE to halt the project, Soule, Varell and Evicci have only days to figure out what was done, how it was done and how to stop it.