In remote pockets of the Third World, a deadly virus is quietly sweeping through impoverished farming villages and shanty towns with frightening speed and potency. In West Africa, an undercover dissident journalist learns of an investment consortium planning to funnel billions of dollars into the continent. Before he can publicize details, he is savagely murdered. And in Washington, a three-word message left in a safe deposit box may be the thread that connects these seemingly unrelated incidents—if, that is, two brothers can decipher it before time runs out. Charles Mallory, a private intelligence contractor and former CIA operative, begins to discover the traces of a secret war, with a bold objective—to create a new, technologically advanced, and lucrative society in an unlikely region of Africa; a model civilization able to solve the age-old, seemingly insoluble problems that plague many Third World nations. With the help of his brother, Jon, can he break the story to the world before it is too late—before the 'humane depopulation' takes place? As the stakes and strategies of this secret war become more evident, the Mallory brothers find themselves in a complex game of wits with an enemy they can't see: a new sort of superpower led by a brilliant, elusive tactician who believes that ends justify means.