"Your career profile could be of interest to us. Would you please get in touch?"

Jerome Carceville finds it impossible to resist such an e-mail, especially when the invitation comes from De Wavre International, one of the top headhunting organizations in the world. He responds, and after undergoing a variety of searching interviews and psychometric tests, he is eventually selected for a decisive final examination.

The fifteen talented and driven finalists arrive at a hotel on an island in the middle of an Alpine lake. Only two of them have a realistic chance of being offered the job, and when Del Rieco, the "games-master", informs them that the nature of the contest is stimulated economic warfare, that their only weapons will be a computer and some strategic information, and that their competitors must be eliminated, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary recruitment drive... What seems to start as a simple team-building exercise soon becomes a horrifying and bloody battle for supremacy.