The high-tech industry is the industry of the new millennium, where fortunes are made overnight, where technical innovation makes forward leaps every day on the backs of a new generation of computer engineers, where starting salaries, bonuses, and stock options lure young talent away from traditional professions. One such individual drawn toward these financial rewards is Michael Patrick Ryan, who ranks at the top of his computer engineering class at Stanford University. Ryan chooses SoftCorp, Inc., headquartered in “Silicon Hills,” the nickname for the booming high-tech industry of Austin, Texas. Ryan is not only offered a generous financial package and also a good job for his new wife, but also a great project: the development of a virtual-reality interface to revolutionize the storage and access of information at SoftCorp's single client: the Internal Revenue Service.
But Mike Ryan has also fallen in the sights of the FBI. The Bureau suspects that SoftCorp and the IRS are in the middle of funneling hundreds of millions of dollars out the country. The Feds, however, can't prove it. The FBI's previous informant, an IRS employee, was mysteriously killed in an auto accident while the agent running the investigation was brutally murdered. Now Special Agent Karen Frost takes over the case but needs a new insider to jumpstart it. The seasoned FBI agent bides her time, making her selection and then waiting for the right moment to make contact, well aware that SoftCorp closely monitors the lives of its employees. She manages to send Ryan a message, a warning of the surveillance, of the criminal agenda lurking beneath the surface at SoftCorp.
In order to verify this claim, Ryan immerses himself in a virtual-reality run through SoftCorp's network, applying his old hacker skills to find a secret directory containing video files. He confirms, to his horror, that his employer has indeed installed cameras in his home--as well as in the homes of every employee at the firm. Angry that his most intimate moments have been video taped, Ryan now wants out. No amount of money and benefits can compensate for the loss of privacy. But he can't simply walk away. Ryan owes them a lot of money--money he would have to pay back is he leaves before fulfilling his contract. He is trapped.
Karen Frost offers the Ryans a deal: federal help in return for his assistance, for putting his life--and the life of his wife--on the line to gather the evidence that the Bureau needs to stomp this criminal ring. Out of options, Ryan reluctantly agrees to become an informant.
Now Ryan is forced to use his computer skills to seek the truth beyond his company's façade, peeling through the layers of software masquerading a conspiracy reaching far beyond SoftCorp and the local branch of the IRS. His search leads him north, to the nation's capital, where an inner circle of politicians and businessmen who consider themselves above the law are conspiring to reshape our nation's future, without realizing that they are all puppets in a show masterminded by a single man with a single agenda--an agenda that could bring our nation to the brink of nuclear destruction.
When Ryan finally reaches this conclusion, he finds himself a marked man, the target of assassins. With the help of Karen Frost he manages to escape, but fails to prevent his wife from getting kidnapped. Enraged, determined not just to get her back but to crush those who have attacked him, Ryan invokes every shred of computer knowledge to launch an unprecedented high-tech strike against this criminal ring.
He will rescue his wife and expose this conspiracy, or die trying.
