In this belated sequel to Marathon Man Goldman jumps several years into the future of the Levy brothers. Thomas is now a history professor at Columbia, and Scylla, the lethal secret agent left for dead in New York's Lincoln Center, has been restored and reactivated as a top-level killer by his shadowy masters in the U.S. government. In the nether world of Washington policymaking science has become a major weapon in a bizarre struggle between hawks and doves, and Scylla's assigned role is to eliminate two scientists whose invention of new creative killing methods may be more dangerous than the problem they set out to solve. The imaginative, if sometimes bizarre, plot winds its way through seemingly unconnected episodes of considerable violence before reaching an ironic conclusion which pulls all the threads together.