Michael D'Arcy, after the daring escape from his prison in China, is back in Europe relaxing on the beach in the Southwest of France, recovering from his dramatic adventure, investigating the trafficking of rare timber by unscrupulous Chinese businessmen whose criminal dealings were inflicting irreparable damage on the rainforests of Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific Rim.
Together with Lucy Wang, daughter of a Chinese tycoon, Michael had discovered a vast system of rosewood timber trafficking involving billions of dollars. The profits enabled Henry Wang to invest outside of China via a system of transfer pricing, through screen companies in Caribbean tax havens, where the profits skimmed off were invested in property and business acquisitions in Europe.
China's insatiable appetite for raw materials-for the construction of homes in the greatest real estate boom in human history, has reached bursting point. Chinese entrepreneurs have become prodigiously rich, accumulating staggering debts, creating a gigantic bubble, now on the point of implosion.
Michael is called by Sir Patrick Kennedy head of the INI Banking Corporation and invited to join him on his superyacht anchored off the coast of Monte Carlo. There he finds himself co-opted onto Kennedy's team of trusted advisers and sent to Central America to prepare a confidential report on the political and economic viability of setting up a pharmaceutical plant, designed to produce a mysterious drug, Galenus, part of Kennedy's long-term plan to build a life science centre at the heart of Ciudad Salvator Mundi, his futuristic city in the Colombian Andes, a fortress built to survive the coming Apocalypse.
In Central America, Michael is confronted with a world parallel to that he had discovered in Southeast Asia, and sets out to cross the Darien Gap, where he meets desperate migrants confronting the dangers of jungle trails, human trafficking and Narcos.
His task is set against a geopolitical background marked by a battle for power and influence as China and Russia expand their interests into the Americas, by Russia's war in Ukraine, and by China's challenge to the West for global hegemony.
