The Survivor

The novel opens with Samuel Carver masquerading as a maintenance man. He sabotages the executive jet of wealthy Texan businessman Waylon McCabe. The sabotage fails and McCabe begins to suspect that he was the target of an assassination as opposed to a victim of a freak accident. The novel then jumps forward to continue the story of Cain's first novel, The Accident Man. Carver is recovering in a Swiss hospital and attempting to regain memories lost during the torture by that book's villain.

The story centres around McCabe's attempt to obtain a lost Russian suitcase nuke in an effort to instigate a nuclear holocaust that would bring about the rapture; Carver aims to stop him.