New York: Late at night, the rain pouring down, a well-dressed woman in her sixties stands in a doorway, a gun in her purse, waiting for a Senator to come home. Washington, D.C.: The phone rings on the desk of Blake Johnson, head of the White House department known as The Basement. The President wants him now. London: The Prime Minister sits thinking of Sean Dillon, the one-time terrorist, now his most effective, if not exactly trusted, operative. It'll have to be Dillon, he thinks. There's no one else. Someone is killing off the members of a splinter group known as the Sons of Erin, normally not a cause for much concern, but the consequences are much greater than anyone realizes. For in these actions lie the seeds of disaster: the fall of two governments, the derailing of the Irish peace process.