The disease starts out like a cold - and soon turns deadly. It is caused by a highly communicable, wildly aggressive bacteria that is immune to all know antibiotics. In one year, it will kill sixty percent of the global population. It is just a theory - a brilliant, highly credible, frightening bit of epidemiological research by Dr. Elaine Wilkes, a scientist in a secluded California laboratory. Then a bizarre confluence of events makes it real. A rat bites a man in a dump in Iquitos, Peru. A wild parrot is transported to the island of Sao Tome, off the west coast of equatorial Africa. And a syphilitic whore goes in search of her lost lover. Unaware that the plague she predicted has already begun its deadly march, Elaine Wilkes has fled to Seattle with the formula for the drug that can cure it - a gold mine her employers planned to withhold from the world in a grisly game of supply and demand. She convinces Phil Paris, an obsessive cop with his own vicious enemies, to help her reach the proper authorities. But as the fatal epidemic crashes across Africa, Asia, Europe, and onto America's shores, communications crumble, the dead pile up, and the law of the streets takes over. And in the center of the madness, a psychopathic genius readies the final, stunning blow..