Rice has AIDs, got it in prison, Now he feels like he’s got nothing to live for, nothing to be afraid of. So when he’s approached by Police Officer Clay Tredway to kidnapped his wife’s niece, Rice agrees, he needs the money to end his days in style. However, at the last minute Tredway wants Rice to kidnap the son and daughter of billionaire software developer Cyril Radoslaw. Rice doesn’t want to do it, as it complicates the perfect crime he’d worked out, but then there’s that AIDs thing, so he agrees.

Race car driver Sara Hackett, Clay Tredway’s wife, comes home early from an off road race in Australia, because she’s worried about the custody battle she’s having with her niece Kelly’s wealthy grandmother. When Sara’s brother and his wife died in an auto accident, Kelly went to live with Sara and Clay, but Grandma Estelle wants Kelly with her in Hawaii.

When Sara gets home she discovers first that her husband has a pregnant girlfriend and her marriage is over, then that her niece Kelly has been kidnapped. The kidnappers want wealthy Estelle to fork over a million bucks, but Sara doesn’t think the old woman will pay. Then Sara sees on the news that someone tried to kidnapped Cyril Radoslaw’s children. The boy got away, but fourteen-year-old Paige had been taken.

Since Clay and his partner also handle security for Radoslaw, in addition to being Huntington Beach homicide cops, Sara begins to think Clay was in on the kidnapping of Radoslaw’s daughter and her niece as well.

Meanwhile Paige and seven-year-old Kelly are being held in Central California. It’s dark, they’re frightened and they see a chance to escape the two men who are holding them. They get away and flee into a dark and dangerous oil field. In short order their captors realize they are gone and give chase.

Back in Huntington Beach someone has burned Sara’s house to the ground, with Paige’s father dead in Sara’s bed. Now the cops, with her husband leading the charge, are after Sara for murder. She figures out where the kidnappers are holding the children, and with only an elderly woman and her dog for help, Sara heads up to the oil fields of Central California, just a step ahead of the law. Can she get to the girls in time? Can she save them?

And back in the oil field Paige and Kelly are in full flight. They hide first here, then there, as their pursuers get ever closer. The kidnappers no longer care about keeping the girls alive, they want them dead, and the frightened children know it. Paige could escape, but not with Kelly, the child is too young and too slow, so Paige has to tough it out, playing cat and mouse with her deadly trackers until she figures a way out of her dilemma.