Tons of concrete are poured onto a motorway bridge - and the police want Crowe and Burnett for murder.

The laws are the tricky rules of high finance which Burnett has played all his commercial life and has to play again, on the run and under darkness.

The polished practitioners of organised crime in Detroit learn that Burnett is alive and can still provide something they want.

That's what they called Lew Burnett when he ran a contract in a totalitarian police state. If he goes back to find answers he will find himself accessory to corruption, under sentence of death, and will be chained to a prison wall.

The chariot drives across the coast of Scotland where North Sea oil and the land where it will devour conflict in a struggle for the world's highest stakes. This is where one of Burnett's ex-partners realised ambition when he bought a Highland estate and its lairdship.

The Knave is an accountant in Locarno, protected by bodyguards and an electrified fence - the architect of embezzlement. And some of it is Burnett's money.

The tower is the high skeletal framework above a power station under construction. Burnett and Crowe go back over the private airfield and the ashes of the plane crash that killed Burnett's wife.

The wheel spins from a wounded scramble across moors to a wages robbery to raise funds for survival.