[NightBird]

Resurrection is free today.

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 innoculating their population against a disease which has been wiped out for twenty years?

A young Iraqi student at the Institute of Molecular Science in Edinburgh, Scotland kills himself for no apparent reason. Nobody links these incidents until Adam Dewar, investigating the movement of smallpox virus fragments between UK research institutes, 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 someone else to finish the job.

And then smallpox breaks out on the Muirhouse Estate, one of the poorest and most densely populated areas in Edinburgh. The priority is to contain the virus, but with the death toll rising, riots breaking out on the estate and the iraqis still waiting, 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 only be too willing to hold the world to ransom.