Fresh from retaking a battle-scarred White House after a vicious terrorist attack on the president, Mitch Rapp, the CIA's top counterterrorism operative, is sent on his final mission. His target: a well-known German industrialist who has been selling highly sensitive equipment to one of the world's most notorious sponsors of terrorism. As Rapp meticulously prepares to take the man out, he has no idea that there are forces within his own government that are plotting to use him.

Thomas Stansfield, the aged director of the CIA, is dying of cancer -- and he and the president have chosen as his successor Dr. Irene Kennedy, the director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. There are others in Washington, however, who could not imagine a more unwelcome choice, and they are willing to resort to extreme measures to prevent Kennedy from taking the reins of the world's most powerful intelligence agency.

The conspirators have devised a bold plan that will damage the president and ruin Kennedy's career, allowing them to put someone they can control at the helm of the CIA. Unfortunately for them, they have made one horrible miscalculation: they have chosen Mitch Rapp as their pawn.

Their worst nightmare is about to be realized. They have enraged one of the most lethal and efficient killers the CIA has ever produced -- and he will stop at nothing until he finds out who set him up.