Mary Ellen Duke joined the CIA when she was 23, dreaming of a life of glory and intrigue. Instead she got the graveyard shift, buried in the bowels of Langley sorting through an endless stream of surveillance photos and blurry satellite images. Then late one evening, her eyes dull with fatigue, another dinner date cancelled, she discovers an awful truth. The CIA, the United States, likely the entire globe, is about to be brought to its knees by the greatest threat of the modern world; a computer super-virus called Buzzworm.

The CIA hires an eccentric Canadian hacker to find the source of the virus. Instead he becomes a murder suspect when his attempt to remove the mysterious program causes the deaths of several key agency employees.

Gregory Hyde, Washington DC's oldest and most infamous homicide detective is brought in to solve the case. He finds himself reluctantly on the trail of both the hacker and Mary Ellen who have teamed up to track down the lair of Buzzworm in the wilds of Virginia.