Islam's holiest relic is missing.

Only one man can get it back.

But to do so, he must first infiltrate the
murky underworld of genetics trafficking.

Former Defense Intelligence agent Cas Fielding has been surfing away his penurious retirement years on the waves of Malibu. But his rum-hazed hibernation is suddenly disrupted when an old associate in the spook business corners him with an assignment.

Islam’s most revered relic, the Black Stone of Kaaba, has been stolen from Mecca.

It’s Fielding’s bum luck that he’s the only veteran operative with the contacts inside the radical Saudi sects to recover the Heaven-sent treasure before the embarrassing loss becomes public. If he doesn’t get the job done, and fast, an outraged Arab street will topple the Saudi royal family—and the U.S. government will be drawn into a bloody scramble for Arabian Gulf oil.

The mission is best suited for the insane or suicidal, but Fielding, thumb-screwed with extortion, has no choice but to accept. In need of some intellectual firepower, he hooks up with the perfect, if reluctant, sleuthing partner: Marly McKinnon, a sultry Ivy League professor who is the world’s leading expert on meteorites.

It doesn’t take long for Fielding and his geek siren to find their quest turning into an even more deadly race—this one to find out why someone is trying to corner the market on the world’s oldest human DNA. In this fast-paced mystery-thriller se in the seedy underworld of genetics manipulation and trafficking, our scrapping, mismatched romantic duo learns the hard way the truth of the old adage that nothing in the Middle East is ever what it seems.