Locked in a tight battle for re-election, President Clay Dixon knows his best chance for victory is the popularity of his wife, Kate. But the disenchanted First Lady is about to desert him. When an orchard accident seriously injures Kate's father, a retired senator and former vice president, she returns to the family farm in Minnesota to be at his side. Assigned to protect her, Secret Service agent Bo Thorsen, soon falls under Kate's spell. Bo suspects that the accident is part of a trap to lure the First Lady home, a trap set by a man named David Moses, an excaped mental patient who once loved Kate. But although Bo and Moses don't realize it, they're caught in a larger web of deadly intrigue, spun by a shadowy, seemingly insignificant bureaucratic department within the federal goverment itself. Racing to find answers before an assassin's bullet kills Kate, Bo comes to understand that when you lie down with the Devil, there is hell to pay.