Shadow Man

In a cave amid ancient Indian ruins lies the body of a senior scientist from the nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos. His skull has been crushed, his throat slit, and a line of blood in the form of a serpent has been traced on his forehead. At his feet are rare tribal prayer sticks. Local police see a ritual slaying intended to scare off Anglos trading in religious Indian artifacts. But federal investigators speculate about a far more sinister possibility: that the victim was violently purged from an espionage network peddling secret space war technology to the Soviets. To the FBI, this conspiracy will stop at nothing, certainly not the murder of one man.

For physicist David Parker, the bizarre killing of his colleague is at first an annoying distraction from his intensive work on a revolutionary defense laser shield and the need to justify it to himself and to reluctant members of Congress. Yet all too quickly he finds himself the target of a ruthlessly expert setup—complete with planted evidence and an intricate computer trail leading directly to his own terminal, making him appear both a murderer and a spy.

Unknowingly, Parker is assisted by reservation policeman Thomas Reyes, a Pueblo Indian and ex-Marine who is rediscovering his people's sacred beliefs and rites, but knows, in this case, that he must use both his wits and his knowledge of the Anglo world to find the murderer. The two men will be brought together by Parker's young son, an imaginative child who believes that the violation of Pueblo taboos has unleashed the "shadow man," the killer who has appeared as no more than a shadow against a cave wall. Together they must follow this elusive evidence into a world of ancient myths and black markets, politics, intrigue, and high-tech weaponry … to the shocking, terrifying truth behind the ultimate purposes of the New Age research at Los Alamos.