Daniel Jameson McKenzie is a widowed forty-six-year-old college professor whose youngest daughter, Amanda, is kidnapped while on a mission trip and carried away by men working for Ramón Duarte, a known drug and human trafficker. Frustrated when the US Government refuses to help, Daniel takes matters into his own hands.

He assembles an unlikely team of friends and family and flies secretly into a Third World country to attempt to extract his daughter. Unbeknownst to him, he is interfering in a covert CIA operation to manipulate the political leadership of Colombia in the wake of the assassination of its president, an operation in which Ramón Duarte is a key figure. And in the process, Daniel incurs the wrath of Nathan Stroud, the corrupt and powerful chief of the CIA's Special Projects Office.