Cotton Malone, once a member of an elite intelligence division within the Justice Department known as the Magellan Billet, is now retired. But when his former boss, Stephanie Nelle, asks him to track a rogue North Korean who may have acquired some top secret Treasury Department files, the kind that could bring the United States to its knees, Malone is vaulted into a harrowing twenty-four-hour chase that begins on the water in Venice and ends in the remote highlands of Croatia.