Jon Smith is attending a W.H.O. conference in The Hague on infectious diseases and wakes in his hotel room to find a man aiming a gun at him. Smith neutralizes the shooter, and finds three pictures in the assassin's pocket: one of an unknown woman, one of Peter Howell, his friend and a former agent with Britain's MI6, and one of him. When Smith tries to leave the hotel, he encounters a second group of terrorists in the process of attacking it. The hotel is not the only target in The Hague. Within minutes of Smith's narrow escape, bombs go off at the train station, airport and at the headquarters of the International Court of Justice, where a Pakistani warlord, Oman Dattar, is being held while he is tried for crimes against humanity. In the resulting chaos, Dattar escapes. Dattar has learned of a new strain of bioelectric bacteria that can grow electrical wires as a form of cilia. These cilia connect with another metallic source and can transmit and transport themselves via electric current. These bacteria are carried to the W.H.O. conference in preparation for an international consortium of biologists convened to study them, along with other strains of deadly bacteria. Dattar arranges for his men to steal the bacteria and use them to bring down the West once and for all. Can Jon Smith stop him?

Robert Ludlum launched his career as a bestselling writer with THE SCARLATTI INHERITANCE in 1971, the first of a string of international bestsellers. There are more than 300 million copies of his books in print and they have been translated in 32 languages.