Jack Wilson has just been released from Allenwood, a maximum-security prison, in White Deer, Pennsylvania. Now that he's a free man, he is hell-bent on a 'return to Paradise'. By which he means the destruction of Western civilization...
Native American by birth, Wilson is a brilliant mathematician obsessed with the secret notebooks of Nikola Tesla - and the 'Ghost Dance' of his historical namesake, the Paiute Indian Jack Wilson. Tesla, a turn-of-the-century genius, claimed (and the KGB believed) that he had discovered a weapon of unparalleled destructiveness, a weapon Wilson seeks to use.
It is Wilson's belief that Western civilization is a fragile enterprise, so technically interdependent upon its various components that a carefully targeted attack upon its infrastructure might well bring down the whole thing. And that was also the idea of the first Jack Wilson, whose vision of the Ghost Dance imagined a kind of Indian Rapture brought about by a great shaking of the earth - after which the civilization of the white man would disappear.
In our time, in a plot reminiscent of The Straw Men, Jack Wilson sets this diabolical scheme in motion...
