Hidden behind a maginot Line of safe houses and front operations in quiet Westport, Connecticut, are Paul Bannerman and his elite group of contract agents. They don't look any different from their neighbors. They run restaurants, a medical clinic, a travel agency - until something big brings them out of retirement.

When Bannerman boards a plane fro Switzerland, all he and his girlfriend have in mind is a lot of loving and a little skiing. Instead Susan Lesko winds up in a cocaine-induced coma, and Bannerman can't figure out whether the hit was set up to hurt him, or Susan's father, Ray Lesko, a retired New York City cop.

Between the two of them they have plenty of enemies, including the narcotraficantes and the CIA. But what Bannerman doesn't know is that his group has been chosen as a test case for a new State Department toy - a computer program called the Ripper Effect. Generated on the giant Cray-3 machines deep in the Department of Defense subbbasements, its purpose is to destroy criminal organizations though stategically chosen assassinations. The secretary of state wants to know if it works well in the field as it does on the screen. Yet in picking Bannerman and his band of deadly operatives, he may have made the biggest mistake of his life.