With an inexhaustible depth of knowledge of military protocol and practices at his fingertips, author W.E.B. Griffin creates a unique figure at the center of a situation filled with similarly unique circumstances. He packages it with the kind of skillful credibility that could only be the product of experience and training. If you want to get a sense of relationships at the highest level of the U.S. government and its agencies, get a load of this.

Jean-Paul Lorimer, a bald, black man of 46 who is a career professional working in a ministerial position for the United Nations, prepares to leave his apartment in Vienna with enough haste and desperation to abandon the 7,000 Euros in the safe and a houseful of exquisite antiques. But, his luggage and pockets hold hundreds of thousands more.

Before departing for his secret estancia in Uruguay, he pays a visit to Henri Couchon, an important Lebanese business associate, and finds him dead with his throat slit, suggesting why he's in such great haste. The people who did this are really after him.

Betsy Masterson, wife of Jack Winslow Masterson, a black African American deputy chief of mission staioned at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is kidnapped after waiting for her tardy husband at a swank restaurant--reasons and perpetrators unknown. Diplomats and ambassadors are aroused, but none more so than their ultimate boss, the president of the United States.

His response is to appoint an executive assistant at Homeland Security to run down to Buenos Aires and find out what's going on. The agent he decides on for the personal mission is Charley G. Castillo, born Karl Gossinger, scion of the Gossinger fortune in Germany who recently pulled off the return of a 747 from its Somalian robbers under highly complex and clandestine circumstances. Somehow, the president is convinced he's the right man for this job.

When Jack Masterson eludes his protectors in order to pay ransom to the kidnappers for his wife, he's killed, and assumed to be the true target, but Charley has some doubts about it. And, later, when he sends his private car for the two Secret Service agents who are his chosen assistants, one of whom is Betty Schneider, the female agent he's in love with, it is attacked and machine gunned. Scheider is hit with richeting fire and sidelined in intensive care.

What this turns out to be is an investigation into and within the most covert and ruthless operators of the arms and oil businesses, hampered by the intense competitions and face-saving sensitivities in the political hierarchy of foreign governments as well as our own, and the presidential finding authorizing Castillo to assume the position of chief of a clandestine agency reporting directly to him. Holy beaurocracy!

However illogical it all may sound in the abstract, Griffin turns it into a rewardingly detailed exploit filled with threat and suspense, bucked by agents of competing interests, spiced with sex and romance, and lead by a smart central figure of considerable machismo and charisma. The credibility of the idea that only he could so deftly strip away the layers of deceit and greed in the U.N.'s oil for food program, converting it into a grab bag of criminal enterprise and revealing those who pockets were lined with huge sums of money, is testament to Griffin's equally huge ability to make a delicious read out of such a notion.