Once, Evan Tanner was known as the thief who couldn't sleep, living out the dangerous and glamour-filled fantasies others lived only in dreams, until the day his assignment for the super-secret intelligence agency that employed him went awry. Tanner disappeared, courtesy of a single conspirator with one mean double-cross.

Now Tanner is a little older, a quarter-century behind the times. No sooner has he returned to a world that forgot him -- or so he thinks -- than Rufus Crombie, Tanner's new benefactor, contracts him for a new case. Crombie's concern is the organization known as SLORC, which is stifling a growing rebel movement in faraway Burma. Tanner's covert assignment: destabilize the government.

Not an easy task considering that once he arrives, he's hounded by the local police, discovers a corpse in his hotel room, befriends a cool beauty with an agenda all her own, and receives an anonymous warning: Get out of Burma or you die.