Special Agent J.J. Speed is a CIA agent and a former priest who changed his life after the tornado struck the Church in Normal, Illinois, at which he was conducting Mass. The tornado stripped him of his priestly vestments (along with the clothing of everyone else in the congregation) and sent them sailing into the sky. Twenty years later, stuck in a dead-end assignment in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, he happens across his priestly scarf—definitive as it was embroidered with his initials—being sold by a street vendor. He is shortly reassigned to New Orleans.
