Alexander Patterson, head of Project Z, a US government organization hidden from the world under a lonely stretch of Texas desert, discovers a secret is not safe—a dark and dirty secret. Only two people know that the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy was no accident. But on a computer disk drive, long ago relegated to the dusty corner of a forgotten scrap heap, a dead man's tale lies buried in the bits and bytes. Roger Howard, a newly appointed UCLA professor, buys a pile of old drives for his class in data recovery. And as the students begin to recover data, one of them is murdered. But Patterson knows the secret is still not safe until all threats are removed. He just didn't realize removing Roger Howard, an ordinary college professor, would not be easy.