Late in the 19th century Giovanni Scarlatti started his fortune by combining his engineering genius with some daring investments.  He married Elizabeth Wyckham, and together they built a fortune which would bring the former poor immigrant into the richest 1% of this world in only a few decades.  He died rather young, leaving a widow and three teenage sons behind.  Giovanni's engineering genius was no more, but Elizabeth's financial genius consolidated and expanded their wealth, from her headquarters in New York she governed a small empire of companies throughout the United States.  She was a little disappointed in her sons, as two of them missed their father's imagination, and her insight in the human nature, and one of them, Ulster, was simply trouble.  He seemed to have an arrogant disdain for everything and everyone, and a total absence of compassion.

The youngest son, Roland, died on his first day in the First World War.  His brothers planned to revenge him, but Elizabeth feared to be left without any heirs and she ordered Chancellor to stay a civilian, and let Ulster go to war.  During the last days of the war he was rewarded for his courage during combat.  That sounded actually more impressive than it was, since it contained a great deal of acting, complete with a show for his fellow soldiers who thought he was being shot at.  And it contained a meeting with a German officer, but Ulster wisely concealed that.  It was an important meeting, as it layed the foundation for his later second identity: Heinrich Kroeger.

From then on Heinrich Kroeger/Ulster Scarlatti carefully prepares his big move.  He marries, but that's clearly another show.  He seems serious about his interest in large-scale financements, but the reason for that becomes clear when he disappears, taking with him bonds and stock worth several hundreds of millions of US dollars.  Elizabeth is baffled, and so is an obscure intelligence service who links Ulster's disappearance to a not really legal liquidation of bonds in Stockholm.  When Elizabeth travels to Europe to follow her son's trace they send Matthew Canfield with her, but the events force him to reveal the real reason for his travel.  Together they start to unravel the web Ulster left covering his trails, and they start to see the monstrous plan he has, a plan that will change the world if he is allowed to continue...

Frankly I don't really know what to think about this book.  It contains seeds that will later on grow into some great novels, but that label is not something I'd put on this book.  There is the big international conspiracy that is discovered shortly before they carry out their plans.  There is a lot of money involved, and it looks like nothing can stop those plans.  There is a little romance, there is someone forced into a role he never had to play before.  All of that is there in other Ludlum novels, but somehow it doesn't really work that well in this one.

Don't get me wrong: it's an exciting read, time flew while I reread it.  The main characters are more than one-dimensional, the plot certainly fits, the pace is rather slow in the beginning when quite some background is needed, but speeds up nicely.  But what I missed was a sense of "Yes, this is plausible", Ludlum never managed to convince me.  And that goes from the slightly too evil Ulster to the too easy solution Elizabeth comes up with.  And that's a pity, because as I said earlier: the seeds are there. Seeds for what could have been a good novel, and seeds for what turned out to be more than decent later novels.