Enter Dalton Lee, one of the world's pre-eminent architects. As a student at Cambridge some twenty years ago, Lee helped bring the anarchists to their knees when he deduced who among their ranks had assassinated a congresswoman. Now that the group is resuming its campaign of terror, the authorities recruit Lee and his business associates to assist them with the investigation, knowing they all now have a personal stake in finding the killer.

Can Lee and his colleagues figure out why the fringe group chose to have the socialite murdered-and who the murderer was-before New York is under siege and one of their own gets locked within the killer's crosshairs?