After the mysterious death of one Vatican priest and the disappearance of another, Father Ian Pearse, an American working on early Christian texts in the Vatican, comes into possession of a mysterious scroll. He discovers ingeniously coded letters and the text of an ancient prayer never before found in written form. These reveal a conspiracy, by a sect long-thought dead, reaching deep into the present Vatican hierarchy. It becomes a race against a ruthless unknown opponent, which takes Father Pearse from the Vatican, via an ancient Greek monastery, to war- torn Bosnia.