Against a background of rising violence and crime, Wallace pits two opposing forces: those who are working to amend the Constitution so that the Government can impose a drastic rule of "law and order" and those who recognize that the proposed 35th Amendment may conceal a far more sinister and far-reaching plan, one that would subvert the entire process of Constitutional government and replace it with a police state. Opponents in this life-and-death conflict are the bull-like, powerful Director of the FBI, Vernon T. Tynan, and the new Attorney General, Christopher Collins, an ambitious, honest man who supports the controversial 35th Amendment despite his private misgivings, but who discovers that there is a secret plot of an evil and vicious nature behind it.
For Collins, the first doubt is stirred at the deathbed of his predecessor, whose last words are a warning of "The R Document"—the dangerous, mysterious, elusive key to the nation's future. In search of this vital document, in a desperate fight against time, Collins stumbles upon the possibility that the FBI is terrorizing important leaders in California and that the Government may be secretly preparing a concentration camp in the desert against the day when the Amendment has been ratified. As his hunt for "The R Document" continues, Collins finds himself involved in a widening series of dirty tricks: an attempt at sexual blackmail against himself; the establishment of a zombie-like American town in which, as a "pilot program," the citizens have been stripped of their Constitutional rights; a brutal double murder; a revelation of scandal in his wife's past that causes her to vanish.
