Though recently promoted from reporter to editor at The Washington Tribune, Colin Burke has few illusions about life. It's a cold, hard fact: the closer things get to Burke, the more detached he becomes. Then Jennifer Morelli - one of his eager young proteges - places an urgent, breathless call from Frankfurt. Morelli has stumbled onto the story of a lifetime in St. Petersburg, and she has film to back up her findings.

The subject is too hot to discuss over the phone, but she wants Burke to publish the story. They arrange to meet in Washington, D.C., that night.

. She never makes the meeting. And to find out why, Burke returns to Russia - where he had put in long, hard years as a reporter - to piece together the story that Morelli uncovered.

As Burke gropes through the dark, seedy maze of Russian politics, he suspects that the Hermitage, a place of pure beauty filled with the world's most breathtaking art, is at the center of the dark scandal Morelli was about to expose. He follows his hunch - and becomes involved with a ravishing African-American woman named Desdemona McCoy, a Petersburg art gallery owner who may be more than she appears.

Their passionate, tumultuous affair is but one more strange twist in a tangled web of betrayal and clandestine maneuvering. For what Burke discovers blows all his expectations out of the water: a crisis that could explode the fragile Russian government.