9am, 31st December. A man gets onto the packed escalator of a metro station and fires a silenced machine gun through a paper bag. He escapes without being spotted in the chaos that follows.
A note is delivered to the mayor of Washington, D.C., demanding $20 million, or the writer will instruct the gunman to strike again, at 4 pm, 8 pm and midnight. The mayor decides to pay up. But then a man is killed in a hit and run accident - and his fingerprints match the ones on the note.
With the brains behind the operation dead, there's no way of stopping the gunman killing again, and again, and again... The only evidence the FBI have is the note. And Parker Kincaid, forensic document expert, is the only man who can stop the killer. But he's running out of time...
