John Barron was once a top detective in the Los Angeles Police Department's elite 5-2 Squad. A deadly shootout with fellow officers changed his world forever.

Taking a new identity, he fled the country he loved and as Nicholas Marten became a landscape architect in the north of England determined to put a life of violence behind him forever. Then suddenly he found himself in Spain ensnared in a massive global conspiracy where he saved the life of John Henry Harris, the president of the United States. Not long afterward the president came calling again.

Sent to the West African country of Equatorial Guinea to gain information on alleged collusion between a U.S. oil company and mercenaries hired to protect its workers, Marten is caught up in a bloody civil war between rebellious tribesmen and a merciless dictator. Soon he meets a priest who has clandestine photographs that show the mercenaries supplying arms to the rebels. In a blink the priest is captured by army troops and Marten flees for his life, determined to find the photographs and turn them over to the president before they are made public and ignite a global firestorm of protest and propaganda. But others are close on his heels. Among them; Conor White, a highly decorated former SAS commando turned elite killer; Sy Wirth, the arrogant president of the oil company; the alluring and dangerous oil company board member, Anne Tidrow; and, quietly, operatives of the CIA.

Murder, suspense, and deceit shadow Marten every inch of the way as his harrowing journey takes him to Berlin, to the Portuguese Riviera, and finally to the always-mysterious Lisbon. At stake is the struggle for control of an ocean of oil, and with it the constantly shifting line between good and evil, love and hate, law and politics. Its cost, thousands of human lives. Its cause, a top secret agreement called The Hadrian Memorandum.