Welcome to Phuket.

It's a paradise.

For the rich,
the beautiful,
and the heavily armed.

Jack Shepherd was a big-time Washington lawyer, politically connected to all the right people. At least he was until he chucked the high life to become just an unremarkable professor at an unknown university in the most unimportant country he could think of.

Plato Karsarkis was a wealthy, glamorous international oil trader. Then a federal grand jury indicted him for racketeering and money laundering. There was something else, too. The matter of a woman who was to testify at his trial and whose throat he may or may not have slashed. When Plato Karsarkis abruptly disappears, it all comes together to make him the world's most famous fugitive, a latter-day combination of Marc Rich and O. J. Simpson.

Jack Shepherd walks into a bar in Phuket and finds Plato Karsarkis waiting there for him, but it is anything but the coincidence it first appears to be.

Against all his instincts, Jack is drawn into an uneasy friendship with Karsarkis, and when Karsarkis asks Jack to use his White House contacts to obtain a presidential pardon for him, it puts Jack in an uncomfortable position. At exactly the same time, United States Marshals are secretly leaning hard on him to help them mount a kidnapping so they can drag Karsarkis back to America for trial.

The truth is that Jack doesn't really want any part of either of them. But then he discovers something that chills his soul and changes his mind.

The marshals aren't really in Thailand because they want Karsarkis back. They're there because Karsarkis knows something he shouldn't, and somebody — somebody who must be very important indeed — wants Plato Karsarkis dead.