In 1959, a stolen film reel of Russian psychic Nina Kulagina demonstrating her abilities is smuggled from the Kremlin to Washington, setting in motion not an arms race, not a space race, but a race to acquire psychic spies to engage in espionage behind the Iron Curtain. In 1961, during the hottest days of the Cold War and at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, John, a young, educated African American, comes to the attention of the CIA for his remarkable ability to remote view (mentally perceive what a person is seeing or thinking). He is broken out of a hellish prison in the Deep South in the dead of night-and John has one more gift: the ability to bend the will of a targeted subject. Indoctrinated into the art of spycraft, John, in his freshman outing, becomes embroiled in a deadly affair in Los Angeles involving the Mafia, President John F. Kennedy, and starlet Marilyn Monroe. Then, whisked to Istanbul, John is tasked with eclipsing (assassinating) scientist Pyotr Liukin, who is building nukes for Castro in Cuba. However, John runs afoul of Soviet bombshell remote viewer Ursula Sobieski-a woman with her own agenda-as well as a troika of psychic spies from divergent superpowers who have united to hunt him down and kill him.