Opening in Seattle in the shadow of the Space Needle, an idealistic and individual US senator celebrates the fourth of July with the public and possibly announcing a campaign for the presidency. About to give his speech atop the tower, the senator is brutally assassinated by one of the waiters, who appears to be working in tandem with another. One quietly makes his way from the scene, while the waiter who pulled the trigger manages to evade capture and takes a running jump off the side of the building. A committee decrees that the assassination was the act of a lone gunman, an obsessed nut, and closes the case.
Three years later, Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) a paranoid and clearly terrified TV reporter who witnessed the killing firsthand, turns up at her at Joe Frady’s (Warren Beatty) apartment. Joe was also there that fateful day and is also a journalist for a Seattle-based paper. Carter says that somebody is trying to kill her and shows Frady evidence of six other people dying since the assassination. He dismisses her and sends her on her way. The next day she’s in the morgue having died of a drug overdose.
Frady takes up the investigation and his first port of call is a small village where a judge had drowned while fishing. The local police force don’t take kindly to his questions and try to kill him. Joe escapes, and snooping around the police officer’s house, he discovers some forms for the Parallax Corporation…
