In the early 1600s, Barwicke Brannon and his wife, Nicholina, gave birth to a child on a ship bound for the New World-only to see the child fall ill and its illness spread. In order to save the remaining lives onboard, the child had to be sacrificed to the sea. Barwicke agreed, but he did not realize that as the baby drowned, so would his wife, as she threw herself overboard. So began the Brannon obsession with purity and a lack of genetic defect. Centuries later, Thomas Brannon is part of the Caltech graduating class of 1955 and has been schooled in the family history well. According to the Brannons, death is sometimes necessary to ensure the survival of the human race. Riff raff are to be disposed of, while intelligence, beauty, and health are to be revered. It is an easy sell to his intellectually advanced classmates, and together they make a plan that, in time, would rule the nation. Soon, a secret society arises-a society who uses kidnapping and rape to produce the perfect race of mankind. Now the breeding season is upon them, and years of research and surveillance are about to pay off. They will manipulate the population and the gene pool of the United States- until an escape threatens to reveal their odious plan and end a four-hundred-year fight for purity.