A university professor and archaeologist was killed in his own country house. The robbers did not take anything, although there was something to profit from in the house. And after some time, the professor’s graduate student, with whom the elderly scientist was connected not only by an interest in the ancient culture of the South of Russia, disappeared. The investigation is at a dead end. The girl's desperate father, a large businessman with great connections, turns to retired secret service lieutenant colonel Sergei Leonidovich Soshnikov. He will have to unravel a very sophisticated crime and intricate connections that stretch beyond the borders of the country and into the past...