In honor of his birthday, San Francisco banker Nicholas Van Orton, a financial genius and a coldhearted loner, receives an unusual present from his younger brother, Conrad — a gift certificate to play a unique kind of game. In nearly a nanosecond, Nicholas finds himself consumed by a dangerous set of ever-changing rules, unable to distinguish where the charade ends and reality begins.

Angela Bennett is a freelance software engineer who lives in a world of computer technology. When a cyber friend asks Bennett to debug a new game, she inadvertently becomes involved in a conspiracy that will soon turn her life upside down. While on vacation in Mexico, her purse is stolen. She soon finds that people and events may not be what they seem as she becomes the target of an assassination. Her vacation is ruined. She gets a new passport at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico but it has the wrong name, Ruth Marx. When she returns to the U.S. to sort things out, she discovers that Ruth Marx has an unsavory past and a lengthy police record. To make matters worse, another person has assumed her real identity …