When the body of CIA agent Jose Carrillo washes up on the shores of the small Texas town of Spanish Palms, chief of police and disillusioned former CIA agent Kelley Castellano reluctantly agrees to search for Carrillo's murderer. His investigation soon leads him to Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez has only recently become president and where Carrillo was investigating the Columbian Metillo drug cartel's attempts to smuggle drugs into the U.S. by manipulating Venezuelan national oil company operations. Posing as a not-so-honest representative of an American oil services company-a company that is actually a CIA front-Kelley meets with the double-dealing Kevin Matthew, owner of Trans-Texas Oil and its Venezuelan subsidiary, Tejas Petroleo de Venezuela. Matthew has been drawn into the Metillo's drug smuggling web as he seeks to obtain a promising oil development lease by bribing key Venezuelan government officials. To induce Kelley and the company he presumably represents to become part of the bribery scheme and provide some of the needed bribery money, Matthew reveals connections to a U.S. senator that will assure, so Matthew says, the passage of a lucrative tax write-off law that can be used to secretly recoup the bribery money. Using the one clue he found on Carrillo's body, Kelly locates Emma, a Venezuelan bargirl who will sell information to Kelley about Carrillo's final days before his murder and the suspicious death of Carrillo's Venezuelan girlfriend. The Mettilo cartel operatives in Venezuela, fearing what Kelley is uncovering, make plans to kill him and dispose of his body in the uninhabited jungles of eastern Venezuela. But others also fear what Kelley is learning. Kelley has discovered that Admiral Cui Shan of the People's Republic of China is in Venezuela posing as a civilian representative of the Communist Chinese government oil company, China Partners Petroleum. Following Cui into the swamplands of eastern Venezuela, Kelly deduces that Cui is trying to obtain the same oil lease as Matthew, but not just for oil development. Anticipating that Kelley has likely deduced Cui's real purpose, Cui kidnaps Kelley, planning to kill him, but only after Kelley reveals what he has had time to tell his CIA superiors about Cui's real purpose. Kelley gears himself for the torture he knows Cui will use to find out what he wants to know. But awaiting his faith, Kelley comes upon a desperate way to perhaps outwit Cui and return to the U.S. to expose Carrillo's murderer.