An international cartel of banks will do anything to bring Southeast Asia to heel - war, riots, debt traps, embargoes, and bribes. No one seems able, or willing, to stop them. Certainly not the regimes that they corrupted.
Not everyone, though, accepts the oppressive economic order. Among them are a high-rolling magnate, a humble shopkeeper, a widowed plantation owner and her daughter, a zealous head of state and his skeptical finance minister, a by-the-book colonel turned rebel, and a hacker team on a mission. These renegades frustrate the cartel's quest for absolute power.
Infuriated by their resistance, the banking cartel suborns the United States Presidency, the US military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the mainstream press in its prosecution of a scorched earth campaign. The cartel is confident that their dollars will buy anything, even nations.