Hassan Cummings the adopted son of Jerry Cummings, one of the principal protagonists of earlier books in this series, enters the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a freshman student. Hassan is of college age but his earlier life experiences, precocious maturity and unwanted notoriety put him in the limelight the moment he got there.

His roommate, Paul Jenkins from a small western Massachusetts town appears early in the story as a serious and studious normal teenager whose somewhat sheltered life is massively changed by his involvement with the affable, self-assured Hassan.

Together they inadvertently become aware of foreign tampering in the certification of materials destined to become part of America's military hardware. The perpetrators of this activity target Hassan and Paul for removal when they uncover its existence.

As the story unfolds, the FBI who had been mostly unaware of the foreign enterprise used Hassan and Paul as bait in their effort to trap the miscreants. To do this the FBI places them in a modified Federal Witness Protection scheme which interrupts their MIT studies and places them in danger of which they are largely unaware when they go into business as cover in their new FBI invented exile.