A priest investigating a mysterious symbol dies, savagely butchered, in Budapest. The symbol, painted with blood by hands unseen, in ways unknown, only appears in Jewish cemeteries and places of pogroms, and is invariably followed by icy dust devils. To pursue the dead priest’s work, another member of the same secretive Order of Saint Michael, teams up with a rabbi in Los Angeles. After cobbling together a group that includes a meteorologist and a vampire, following a deadly game of cat and mouse across Europe and America, they discover a most unusual scroll, and take it to a castle in Provence, where two archeologists and a very peculiar French countess help them decipher it. There, with a traitor in their midst, surrounded by enemies closing in for the kill, they learn that, to stop Armageddon, they must find, and get to the Ark of the Covenant—in a couple of weeks. If they can, when the time comes, would the one fated to become the ‘Freer of Souls’ dare approaching the Ark and, alone in the darkness, do what he must, no matter how painful, to prevent the Apocalypse? Or would he, instead, by unwittingly fulfilling an ancient vendetta, become an instrument of humankind’s doom?