A half-dead man crashes his car at the Iraqi border. He is found to have suffered a rare reaction to the smallpox vaccine. But why are the Iraqi's innoculating their population against a disease which has been wiped out for twenty years?
Soon after this, a young Iraqi student at the Institute of Molecular Science in Edinburgh kills himself for no apparent reason. At first there seems to be no connection. But then medical investigator Adam Dewar stumbles on the horrific possibility that the Iraqis could have asked the student to reconstruct the virus from the fragments he had been working on. And then smallpox breaks out on the Muirhouse Estate. The priority is to contain the virus, but with riots breaking out on the estate, and the death toll rising, Dewar is in a race against time to discover the source of the disease and prevent it falling into the hands of a hostile nation. A nation which would be only too willing to hold the world to ransom...
Ken McClure is an award-winning research scientist with the Medical Research Council of Great Britain. His medical thrillers have been translated into twenty-one languages and all are international bestsellers. He lives and works in Edinburgh.