A socialite is found strangled to death in an unused storage closet within one of Manhattan's iconic hotels. The young woman's murder puts the authorities on edge, but their concern transforms into alarm when they spot a calling card on her corpse. The ominous note confirms a sinister cult subdued many years ago has regrouped to try once again to crush the free world from within. Enter Dalton Lee, one of the world's pre-eminent architects. As a student at Cambridge some twenty years ago, Lee helped bring the anarchists to their knees when he deduced who among their ranks had assassinated a congresswoman. Now that the group is resuming its campaign of terror, the authorities recruit Lee and his business associates to assist them with the investigation, knowing they all now have a personal stake in finding the killer. Can Lee and his colleagues figure out why the fringe group chose to have the socialite murdered-and who the murderer was-before New York is under siege and one of their own gets locked within the killer's crosshairs?