The story begins with an urgent phone call from the remote rain forests of the Congo. Drs. Stephen Pearse and Peter Maryk are summoned to a mining camp where a deadly virus has killed everyone within its reach. Desperate to stop it, they bomb the area, resealing a uranium cave that had housed and nurtured the virus for centuries. Two years later, the disease reemerges in America, devastating the small New England town of Plainville. Stephen Pearse is now head of the FBI-like Bureau of Disease Control; Peter Maryk, a man gifted with a highly advanced immune system, now runs the bureau's clandestine special pathogens section of disease detectives. Since their return from Africa, the two men have become bitter enemies divided by opposing scientific philosophies.
