In 1907 Tom Hornbuckle has staked his claim along a bank of Fish Creek next to Felix Pedro’s gold claim and discovery just north of the Chena River. Claim jumpers kill one of his fellow miners. Hornbuckle makes a startling find of gold and sets out to insure no one will take it from him. Hornbuckle is killed by the claim jumpers, but not before he has sent his lovely Irish wife a quartz rock imbedded with gold. Fate intervenes when Susan receives her husband’s gift to her just as the great San Francisco earthquake ends her life and buries the proof of Hornbuckle’s discovery for nearly a century. Ninety-five years later, an international consortium of economic power sought out the same gold, as a hedge against a collapsing stock market they would trigger in the United States and Europe. To seek revenge for long forgotten failures, they would bring America to her knees. Brad Milner, a special anti-terrorist consultant for the FBI, follows the trail of a murdered young woman whose only mistake was to rediscover a gold strike lost in the frozen earth of Fairbanks at the Fort Knox Gold Mine. Milner discovers that sometimes winning is worse than losing as he himself becomes the primary and only suspect in a murder. He has no defense—except his own clandestine past.