A decorated war hero in Vietnam, Charley, a Green Beret assigned to Special Operations under the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency, was a man who knew too much and posed a potential embarrassment for the Agency and the Government. The wheels began to eliminate him and the threat he posed.
However, when he is rolled in a Virginia motel by a man and woman who steal his wallet and car and are subsequently killed in a flaming automobile crash, Charley Reed escapes the sanction, ceases to exist, and assumes the identity of a comrade who was killed in action. He goes to California and begins a new life.
On July 17, 1996 he is traveling on US Air 217 from Charlotte to Providence when fate steps in. He and two other men on the same flight witness a missile fired from the ocean at TWA Flight 800. The 747 is destroyed and everyone on board is killed. John Hughes, a CIA operative, is assigned to investigate. In the course of his investigation he realizes one of the eyewitnesses is using the identity of an Agency operative who was killed in Vietnam in 1968. With government sanctions forbidden, John Hughes is unable to move on the man he feels may have eluded him years before.
In the days following the events of September 11th, Charley, like the majority of Americans is glued to the television. His past confronts him when he realizes the son he never knew was killed as he attempted to help others escape the north tower of the World Trade Center.
It is at this time Charley attempts to return to the life he left and find out about his son. As he does, the wheels of the machinery of government, long dormant, have come back to life. While the CIA secretly snatches people off the street and interrogates them, John Hughes takes it upon himself to execute the old sanction. Old secrets are exposed and Charley comes face to face with the past he ran away from.
