New Orleans, June 1997. The city's dying of heat and dying on its feet as the port business shrinks and the powers that be carve up a vanishing pie. Steve Gorman, an executive for the APEX courier corporation, sees his colleague Andrew Sinclair disappear, carrying a high-value package containing a stone with miraculous powers... Steve gets the blame, quits APEX and loses his place on the city's Trade Council. Suddenly he's a "non-person," but with the aid of glamorous Creole journalist Monique Chauvin and fey historian Louis Duplantier, he unearths an astonishing conspiracy involving time...