This is the story of Joan Baker a secret service special agent who is hurried out of Kansas City following a threat on her life. Joan changes her name to Regina Singleton and takes on a new identify as she accepts a temporary transfer to the FBI's new Seattle counterterrorism team. She goes undercover as a graduate student at the University of Washington. Her assignment is to infiltrate a unit of the Alliance of Patriots (A), a volatile while supremacist organization recruiting on campus. When AP members are arrested for destroying a radio tower, all the units of the secret organization suspend their activities. FBI undercover agents are cut off from open communications with their units. To help break this silence, Regina makes plans to meet with professor Rosenbloom, an unlikely advisor to the AP unit in Bellingham. Will Rosenbloom tell her what she needs to know? And if he does, will it cost him more than his time with a pretty graduate student. And who is that petite woman in black who lurks in the shadows at every turn. An investigation into an untimely death propels Regina along a path to dark and dangerous places from which falling in love and returning alive are gambles she must take.