After a ruthless military faction has seized power in Washington, D.C., the future of the US is in the hands of State Department bureaucrat Carlton Berg. On the run from the Capitol carrying the new administration’s top-secret enemies list, Berg is incarcerated in a police station in Lodus, Missouri – a small and backward Ozark town. As Department of Homeland Security agents close in, he must convince an unwilling set of confidants – an unsympathetic police chief, a law-abiding administration assistant, and a motor-mouthed fellow prisoner – of his plans to expose the new regime.