Homeland Security Secretary Catherine Blaine receives a frightening communication from a hacker identified only by the pseudonym Janus. The message is the latest in a series correctly predicting natural disasters around the world–disasters that, Janus claims, were manufactured, not natural at all. And, according to the email, unless the United States does as Janus instructs, another disaster is coming–a Category 5 hurricane that will hit the Eastern Seaboard and destroy the lives of tens of millions of people.

Unaware of the crisis in Washington, investigative journalist Jon Mallory stumbles upon a list of seven prominent scientists who have been murdered over the past dozen years. When the person who gave him the list disappears, Jon realizes he has unwittingly become part of a deadly chain of events and contacts his brother, private intelligence contractor Charles, for help. Meanwhile, Catherine Blaine has also come to Charles for help in tracking down Janus and uncovering the frightening new weather technology that threatens the world.

Luke Bowers is in the good and evil business.
On a cold, late-winter morning in the Chesapeake Bay community of Tidewater County, Bowers discovers a dead woman seated in a pew at the church where he is pastor-her eyes open, her hands clasped as if in prayer.
Nothing at the scene identifies the woman or explains why she was at the church. And when state police homicide investigator Amy Hunter comes to town to head up the case, not everyone is pleased that a young, female outsider has the job. The only lead in solving the crime is a sequence of numbers that has been carved into the victim’s right hand, which Bowers suspects may be a reference to the Book of Psalms.
With Bowers’s help, Hunter follows a chain of seemingly innocuous clues to track down a deranged serial killer and unravel an elusive criminal enterprise that is more powerful than they ever could have imagined.

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.