As private detective Isaac Bell begins his investigation into John

D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly, the case soon takes a deadly turn. A sniper begins murdering opponents of the company, and soon the assassin - shooting with extraordinary accuracy at seemingly impossible long range - kills Bell's best witness, a brave and likable man. Then the shooter detonates a terrible explosion that sets the victim's independent refinery ablaze.

Bell summons his best investigators to scour the site of the crime for evidence. Who is the assassin and for whom did he kill? But the murders - shootings, poisonings, staged accidents - have just begun as Bell tracks his phantom-like criminal adversary on a manhunt around the United States, from Texas to a tycoon's enclave of New York, and on to war-torn Russian oil fields on the shores of the Caspian Sea, before a final, desperate confrontation that will prove to be the most explosive of all ...