We first see him in the Dulles Airport where he is to meet his estranged father, "Dusty", an eminent archaeologist who is arriving from Athens to join with the renowned Dr. Anna Ardmore on her forthcoming Southwest excavation in the Four Corners. Worthington has taken his little daughter Emily with him, hoping to avoid an unpleasant confrontation with his father in which he might lose his temper as he had in an adolescent fracas twenty years earlier.
Preservationist Anna Ardmore, beautiful, vivacious, obsessed with the prehistory Anasazi people of the Four Corners, is determined to save their many archaeological sites that are destined to be bulldozed for the wide right-of-way for Worthington's train. She can't fathom how this attractive man can be so insensitive to America's heritage.
In a premeditated scheme Anna seduces Dusty in an effort to get the dirt (so to speak) on Worthington so that she can pressure him into abandoning his project. Dusty, wanting to get even with his son for not becoming an archaeologist and carrying on a three-generation family tradition, tells Anna an unbelievable story that Worthington was responsible for his uncle's death. When she challenges the validity of that yarn, he tells her to talk to Aunt Hattie up there in Maine.
Meanwhile, Anna's fanatical cohort, Quentin Ford IV, chairman of the influential non-profit Institute and Living Museum of Archaeology (ILMA), has his own scheme for doing away with Worthington. After a fund-raising reception for Anna in Washington, D. C., Quentin tells her his plan is the only way to derail the economic development interests supporting the bullet train. Anna, believing Quentin means to assassinate Worthington, pleads for 48 hours to do it her way.
In the never-never world of the coast of Maine, Anna and Worthington meet unexpectedly. Anna has arrived to interrogate Aunt Hattie, but it's Aunt Hattie's funeral that has summoned Worthington. That evening, in an old sea captain's bed and breakfast, Worthington and Anna put aside their public facades for a private night of passion.
An unfaithful Worthington returns to the nation's capital and wife Sara's domestic scene. With Anna dominating his thoughts, he buries himself with work as he prepares for his cross-country promotional tour for The Windjammer.
A self-delusive Anna escapes back to her familiar Four Corners and tries to put Worthington out of her mind, concentrating instead on her immediate task of getting ready for the arrival of the seminarists who will help excavate her Noah's Ark site. Alexander Parish, former baseball star, leads the roster which includes a Houston oil man and his wife, a Wall Street economist, a school teacher, a female banker, Dusty, and Daisy, the woman in short shorts. Isolated from the outside world, they bond together, supporting Anna to the extreme as she forsakes the truth and fabricates an Anasazi discovery in order to focus the whole world's attention on preserving her archaeological wonders.
