Cashiered CIA officer Jim Beauchamp’s life is a bleak processional toward retirement. Wife and daughter long dead, he’s an analyst at the Pentagon, winnowing sheaves of ancient personnel data in support of SLIF, a futuristic information system whose existence is seemingly as meaningless as his own. The sudden engagement of his best friend Cmdr Angie Milano to a toad of a career naval officer leaves Jim with the bleak realization that he’s been a fool.
In a few hours all changes. Friends murdered, Jim and Angie are on the run, trailed by mayhem and entrusted by a dead hand with the only possible copy of the long-lost Eldridge Roster -- the names of those who manned the destroyer USS Eldridge during World War Two’s first ship invisibility experiment. SLIF recreated the roster and SLIF’s owners must have it. Without it, Project Telemachus, perversion of a wondrous meld of genomics and physics, will fail. Without it, the descendants of the Eldridge’s crew will remain safely anonymous unless outted by their own wild but unrealized paranormal powers -- their Potential.
Jim and Angie quickly realize they can’t rebottle the genie that is the roster. And learn that Jim’s daughter Keiko isn’t dead but was taken and raised as his own by Telemachus’s diabolical architect, Dr. Richard Schmidla. Taken, raised and exploited for her awesome Potential. Telemachus’s success will mark Schmidla’s triumph -- the triumph of the genocidal ideology that has so long sustained him in his quest to craft a perfect humanity. If her father’s one chance to rescue her fails, Keiko becomes the unwitting catalyst of Telemachus’s success and humanity’s brief but anguished twilight.