Anna Peters, the unorthodox New World Oil Company researcher, gets tapped for a delicate mission to pre-unification Germany: collect an East German oil chemist who has discovered how to separate oil from sea water. If genuine, the new process means huge profits. Philip McKenzie, New World Oils brilliant chief chemist, assures Anna and her boss that everything is on the level. Anna thinks this may be too good to be true, and when she and McKenzie arrive in Germany she finds out that fraud is the least of her worries. The German chemist and his thuggish brother have their own agendas and some very nasty skills. And the gifted, mercurial Philip Mckenzie has a bad habitputting himself, and Anna, in danger.