Ask the Fire blends the high tech culture of modern espionage and the highly politicized social culture of Washington, D.C., the capital of the world, with the secret of the Knights Templar, Freemasonry in the architecture of the D.C. streets. Add a dash of 60s hippiedom, and plenty of urban gay and post-gay culture, and readers will discover the birth of a new trans-mythological, but deeply spiritual, vision of the meaning of human life in the charged world of the 21st century. "I had a friend who was a spy." So begins a story of terrorism and espionage, featuring a brilliant, almost enlightened, but emotionally jaded and politically cynical secret agent, a gay Mati Hari who'd seduced secrets out of Arab rulers and now struggles to prevent the start of the Terrorist Wars. It's a story with a vast sweep that places spying-and spiritual vision- within the larger history of heresy and homosexuality in Western culture from the Crusades to contemporary Islamic fundamentalists.