Madeline is the perfect woman. Or at least that's what Jack Benson thinks when he meets the exotic, intelligent, and stunning graduate student through an online dating site. She's everything he could have wished for, but sometimes things are too good to be true. In this case, Madeline is a foreign NOC agent who plans to use Jack as an Asset for a terrorist attack. Only Diane, an intrepid, ambitious FBI agent, following Madeline's trail from a previous incident has any chance of stopping her before Jack succumbs fully to Cupid's influence.

Spies have utilized assets for decades. Normal men and women meticulously scouted, recruited, and manipulated to do enemy NOC agents' dirty work. It's arduous, often dull work requiring countless hours of surveillance. Madeline is a new generation of spy. Armed with multiple degrees, extensive combat training, beauty, charm and a killer instinct like a black widow, she has found a short cut for all of that boring work. Dating sites, particularly those which promise matches based on "clinically verified multi-faceted personality profiles," offer a way for her to locate and position herself to recruit and manipulate the ideal assets.

Her first asset is an ideal test subject. Doug is a rookie police officer working in a suburb of DC. The product of a broken home and an abusive father, it doesn't take Madeline long to realize he's struggling with "daddy issues." Doug thinks he's met the perfect woman and when it turns out her ex-boyfriend was abusive his instinct to protect her surfaces. When it appears the jealous ex-boyfriend returns and beats Madeline, Doug's protective tendencies quickly turn into violent rage fueled by 20 years of unresolved feelings of helplessness at his father's hands. Soon the Assistant Director of the FBI is dead at the hands of a patrolman, from the same county the Assistant Director was forming a task force in to investigate corruption in the police department. And Madeline is on to her next target, her true asset, someone to carry out a much larger act of terrorism on American soil.