A half dead man crashes his car at the Iraqi border. He is picked up by a British patrol and found to have suffered a rare reaction to the smallpox vaccine. But why are the Iraqis inoculating their population against a disease which has been wiped out for twenty years? A young Iraqi student in Edinburgh kills himself for no apparent reason. Nobody links these incidents until Adam Dewar, investigating the movement of smallpox virus fragments, stumbles on the horrific possibility that the student had been under pressure from the Iraqis to reconstruct the virus. And with the continued presence of the Iraqi secret service in the city, Dewar can only conclude that they are waiting for somebody else to finish the job. 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 that would be only too willing to hold the world to ransom.