In a secret government installation in California, a political prisoner is grotesquely executed On the East Coast, an elderly Vermont farmer vanishes, the victim of an otherworldly abduction. Three amateur investigators with divergent worldviews - a psychologist, a physicist, and a priest - join forces to discover the relationship between these two events. Stalked by a murderous psychopath intent on stopping them, they encounter UFOs, inexplicable religious phenomena, multiple personalities, and overwhelming psychic violence. They are drawn inexorably forward through the gothic halls of a Canadian hospital for the elderly and demented priests to the locked chambers of a covert American repository for space-age weaponry, where they encounter a sinister application of computer technology.