Evan Begay, Navajo, is a modern day amateur archeologist. While on a trip to the Jemez Mountains, he stumbles on a cave filled with Inca gold artifacts and pictographs that tell the story of a great Anasazi migration. But he is being watched. The day before he intends to break camp and notify the authorities of his find, he is shot and falls into a deep fissure in the mesa where he remains until he dies. A search by authorities finds nothing but an empty camp.

Evans wife, Anna, calls on Hays McKay, an Ohio security firm investigator and old friend, to look for her husband. McKay travels to New Mexico with his fianc, Deirdre, and together with a guide and his sister, they search for Evan Begay. In doing so, they become the targets of four men who are removing the gold artifacts and melting them down to sell. The McKay party finds Evan Begay and the cave, but in doing so, they set up a deadly confrontation between themselves and the thieves who have plundered the cave.

Joshua Pitt, enquiry agent in London England of 1896, has just returned from Ireland when he receives two telegrams, both from Kendal England. One is from a friend and distant relative asking for advice, and the other from a wealthy previous client who is in mortal danger from a man whose brother he killed some twenty years before. The threat will be carried out in twenty six days unless Pitt can track down and deal with the potential killer, or possibly killers. Pitt, an inveterate pipe smoker, takes a part time position in a tobacco shop in Kendal, hoping to gain information but it soon proves fruitless as the daughter of the wealthy landowner is kidnapped.

In the midst of the investigation, Pitt also rekindles a relationship with a nursing sister he met on a previous case but instead of the relationship being a complication, it is beneficial, and the door to a new life may be opening for him.

December 1939. Nighttime Manhattan. Snow mixed with rain. Two shots ring out in an alley. Max Grant, private investigator, two double bourbons under his belt, enters the alley to investigate. A man, two bullets in his chest, dying, paws at his coat pocket. His only words are, "Find the nude on the cigarette case." Grant removes the cigarette case, looks at the picture, pockets it, then calls to bystanders to get the police. Curiosity, even without a client, prompts him to investigate and leads him into the murky sphere of activity that surrounds the beginnings of the atom bomb.

The war in Europe is public, but something else was going on, quietly, behind the scenes, never making headlines in major newspapers or news programs on radio. Walter Lippman doesnt write about it and Edward R. Murrow never mentions it in his CBS news broadcasts. That something is the exchange of nuclear fission information between mathematicians and physicists in the Unites States, England, and Europe. In 1939 that information exchange has diminished in volume between the western scientific communities and those under German control and influence, most notably Denmark and Norway.

Sarah Bennett, the nude on the cigarette case, has been kidnapped and is being held in the Redhook area of New York by German agents. Bennett, a scientist, travels Europe under the guise of an art dealer but is also the conduit for shared information between scientists in Nazi dominated Europe and those in the United States. And Max Grant, in love with a photo on a cigarette case, is just the guy to go looking for her.

Evan Begay, Navajo, is a modern day amateur archeologist. While on a trip to the Jemez Mountains, he stumbles on a cave filled with Inca gold artifacts and pictographs that tell the story of a great Anasazi migration. But he is being watched. The day before he intends to break camp and notify the authorities of his find, he is shot and falls into a deep fissure in the mesa where he remains until he dies. A search by authorities finds nothing but an empty camp.

Evans wife, Anna, calls on Hays McKay, an Ohio security firm investigator and old friend, to look for her husband. McKay travels to New Mexico with his fianc, Deirdre, and together with a guide and his sister, they search for Evan Begay. In doing so, they become the targets of four men who are removing the gold artifacts and melting them down to sell. The McKay party finds Evan Begay and the cave, but in doing so, they set up a deadly confrontation between themselves and the thieves who have plundered the cave.

Joshua Pitt, enquiry agent in London England of 1896, has just returned from Ireland when he receives two telegrams, both from Kendal England. One is from a friend and distant relative asking for advice, and the other from a wealthy previous client who is in mortal danger from a man whose brother he killed some twenty years before. The threat will be carried out in twenty six days unless Pitt can track down and deal with the potential killer, or possibly killers. Pitt, an inveterate pipe smoker, takes a part time position in a tobacco shop in Kendal, hoping to gain information but it soon proves fruitless as the daughter of the wealthy landowner is kidnapped.

In the midst of the investigation, Pitt also rekindles a relationship with a nursing sister he met on a previous case but instead of the relationship being a complication, it is beneficial, and the door to a new life may be opening for him.

December 1939. Nighttime Manhattan. Snow mixed with rain. Two shots ring out in an alley. Max Grant, private investigator, two double bourbons under his belt, enters the alley to investigate. A man, two bullets in his chest, dying, paws at his coat pocket. His only words are, "Find the nude on the cigarette case." Grant removes the cigarette case, looks at the picture, pockets it, then calls to bystanders to get the police. Curiosity, even without a client, prompts him to investigate and leads him into the murky sphere of activity that surrounds the beginnings of the atom bomb.

The war in Europe is public, but something else was going on, quietly, behind the scenes, never making headlines in major newspapers or news programs on radio. Walter Lippman doesnt write about it and Edward R. Murrow never mentions it in his CBS news broadcasts. That something is the exchange of nuclear fission information between mathematicians and physicists in the Unites States, England, and Europe. In 1939 that information exchange has diminished in volume between the western scientific communities and those under German control and influence, most notably Denmark and Norway.

Sarah Bennett, the nude on the cigarette case, has been kidnapped and is being held in the Redhook area of New York by German agents. Bennett, a scientist, travels Europe under the guise of an art dealer but is also the conduit for shared information between scientists in Nazi dominated Europe and those in the United States. And Max Grant, in love with a photo on a cigarette case, is just the guy to go looking for her.