For a "dare," two small boys climb over the wall into the Duke of Cranborne's estate in Hampshire. Both boys are armed with air guns, but what starts as a dare ends in blind terror for one of them as he stumbles in the dark across the body of a man whose head has been blown off. The man is a BID agent, and his death jeopardizes the security of a shoot organized for the prime ministers of several countries before the G20 Summit in London. John Gunn replaces the murdered agent and has to unravel a conspiracy involving nuclear weapons and drugs. From the lush grounds of the Cranborne estate in Hampshire to the bleak and inhospitable mountains of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, Gunn's assignment moves at breakneck speed to prevent the nuclear weapons reaching the Taliban and the heroin reaching the streets of the UK.