A scientist meets a grisly end when he falls from a military research ship and is attacked by a two-ton white shark off the Japanese coast. By the time Special Investigator Vin Cooper reaches the scene, there’s literally very little left to prove that the death wasn’t an accident. But Cooper’s instincts tell him that he’s looking at murder and that in assigning him to this case someone might just as well have shoved him, too, into shark-infested waters.

What kind of top secret project could the military be engaged in that would require the services of a foremost marine biologist and a genetic researcher? The possibilities are ominous, but not as ominous as the truth. And then the unthinkable tragedy that everyone feared since 9/11 explodes with a terrifying sense of déjà vu—in San Francisco.

Suddenly, with a second scientist presumed dead, an unidentified charred body in the morgue, and the “accidental” parachute death of a friend in a Florida training field, Cooper is following a trail as narrow and as dangerous as a knife-edge—a trail that leads to what we all fear a secret “government” within our government whose sworn duty is to kill anyone who opposes them.