Earth is now seriously threatened by a scourge that has plagued it for centuries: human-directed environmental destruction. But one man, a terminally ill businessman with almost unlimited resources at his command, has a plan to fix the problem. IT expert Kaye Richards is putting her husband's suicide behind her when she comes upon and hacks a secret email implicating her employer in Frank's death. Oscar Theodor Brecht, a brilliant engineer and without doubt the world's most powerful businessman, may have arranged his murder. Her search for proof takes her to a resort island in the Coral Sea where she meets and falls for Jack McEwen, an American insurance investigator on the trail of stolen microprocessors. Before long, they are both caught up in Brecht's plans. He has been using a nearby island, Jacob 2, to work on a secret the director of the National Reconnaissance Office in Washington believes is "a Pandora's Box with a technology that, once released, no force on earth will be able to stop." And in the last minutes of Brecht's life that is what happens, with Kaye and Jack and the rest of the world forced to face the madman's legacy, an invincible and inhuman enemy that will attack civilization and threaten all human life.