An Iraqi stonemason drives his family to a construction site to celebrate the project's completion. He arrives late and witnesses the Iraqi military burying all the dead workers, the women, and children in a mass grave.
Years later, a computer software engineer working late one cold winter night in Virginia slides off the road at a highway exit on his way home. His death, a murder, leads to a favor that leads to clues tying the dead man and the stonemason together.
Sitting at his desk one morning, Jason Caius receives an encrypted email containing a series of files. He reads and passes them off to the proper people thinking it's the end. Within days, they summon him to a meeting between the CIA and FBI.
At the meeting, he learns that the email and associated files point to the needed evidence in a long-standing case against one of the world's largest private military contractors, an American company. There is only one problem, details about the evidence is known only by the key witness, the stonemason, and he has gone missing somewhere in Iraq. They task Jason with finding the witness, validating the evidence, and extracting them both.
Jason's fluency in cultural nuances, local dialects, and regional geography make him the best person to blend in, with the requisite skills to survive and adapt to the chaos that is Iraq. The pursuit takes him all over Iraq, to Iran, and to multiple theaters of war, facing Iraqis, ISIS killers, Russians, and corrupt Americans.
But, he's not the only one hunting for the witness.