THE STORY SO FAR...

The year is 2023, and Dr. Gideon Wolfe, a professor of criminal psychology, receives a mysterious visitor in his office. She is Vera Price, the widow of a special-effects wizard murdered outside their New York City apartment just days earlier, his body blown to unrecognizable bits by some unknown weapon. She gives Wolfe a computer disc salvaged from her husband's effects, asks him to look at it and leaves.

What Wolfe sees on the disc is shocking. There is the familiar news footage of the assassination of President Emily Forrester five years earlier in a Chicago hotel ballroom. But instead of the well-known assassin's face in the crowd--an Afghan functionary named Muhammed Khaldun, later convicted of the crime and now serving a life sentence--there is the face of somebody else. Was the footage manipulated to frame an innocent man? And if so, how is that connected to the murder of John Price? For help in solving the mystery, Wolfe goes to his friend Max Jenkins, a private detective. Investigating at the scene of Price's murder, Max finds some hairs, whose DNA he traces to an anthropologist named Eli Kuperman. Though Kuperman is currently in jail in Florida for desecrating an Indian burial ground, he has a twin brother, an archaeologist named Jonah. While Max and Gideon ponder this information, a window in Max's apartment suddenly shatters. Max crumples to the floor, shot to death by a sniper.

Two days later, after being warned by the FBI to back off investigating the murders of Max and John Price, a shaken Gideon Wolfe is on a plane to Florida. There he pays a visit to the imprisoned Eli Kuperman. The anthropologist is eager to see him and seems oddly well versed in his predicament. Their conversation has not gone on for long before the prison is enveloped by a hum that grows in intensity. A wall of the prison vibrates and then collapses, opening a passage to the outside, where a strange-looking vehicle is waiting. With the help of a young woman who emerges from the doorway toting a gun that can blow objects to tiny bits, Wolfe and Kuperman leap from the prison cell into the waiting vessel.

It was cold inside the vessel, a chill made all the more cutting by its contrast to the muggy Florida night and the stale closeness of the visitors' room in the prison. Even before I'd straightened up after landing on the gently heaving deck of the ship, I began shivering; and just as I became aware that I was, a hand started to rub my back.

"Bit of a shock, isn't it?" said the young woman Eli Kuperman had called Larissa. I stood and looked into a pair of enormous black eyes that formed a distinct contrast to the oddly beautiful silver of the hair above and around them; already a bit smitten, I could only nod agreement to her assessment. Unspoken curiosity must, however, have been all over my face--why, I was thinking, would anyone capable of building such a vessel choose to exist in such an uncomfortable atmosphere?--because the woman quickly went on to explain, "My brother's gotten closer than anyone to creating superconductors that can operate at livable temperatures--but we still have to keep most of the ship below 45[degrees]." She tucked her remarkable weapon into a holster that was slung on her side, gave me that devious, bewitching smirk, then looped an arm through one of mine. "You must try to stay warm, Dr. Wolfe..."

Before I could find the words to ask just where we were, Eli Kuperman stuck his engaging, bespectacled face between us, grinning wide and then tugging at one of the men in coveralls who'd been waiting in the hatchway during our escape. The second man's face was nearly identical to Kuperman's, although he wore steel-, rather than tortoiseshell-, rimmed spectacles: this, apparently, was the archaeologist twin brother of whom Max's Internet search had failed to produce any mention.

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