summary

Educationalist and undercover agent Katja Monney is placed in deepest Afghanistan by the USA's Central Security Agency to locate the source of intercepted data signals thought to originate from Al Qaeda and possibly locating Osama bin Laden.

When she finds a special training school for highly intelligent young Afghans led by the very well educated Rais, she doubts that the school has anything to do with bin Laden or Al Qaeda. Despite this The Agency sends their Special Forces to eliminate Rais's operation, without success. With her civilian partner Jean Rosset she follows Rais and his highly educated young operatives to Sicily, where Rais meets with a commercial fisherman, Malek bin Mohammed al Hafiz. When Monney uncovers Malek's plan to ship a highly dangerous 'dirty' radio-active device to New York, a plan that could wreck the US economy, the Agency is convinced that Malek is bin Laden but Monney suspects that international terrorism may have made itself autonomous; and much more dangerous.

The action takes Monney and Rosset through some of the least known and least accessible country on Earth, through danger not only from this terrorist group but also from her employers, The Agency, to a show-down in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia, where The Agency again attempts to capture the man they think is Osama bin Laden.