Jamie Freveletti

Jon Smith is attending a 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 deadly bacteria - and is determined to use them to bring down the West once and for all. Can Jon Smith stop him?

One evening in Washington, DC, several high-ranking members of government disappear in a mass kidnapping. Among the kidnapped is Nick Rendel, a computer software coding expert in charge of drone programming and strategy. He is the victim with the most dangerous knowledge, including confidential passwords and codes that are used to program the drones. If revealed, his kidnappers could reprogram the drones to strike targets within the United States. Jon Smith and the Covert-One team begin a worldwide search to recover the officials, but as the first kidnapping victims are rescued, they show disturbing signs of brainwashing or mind-altering drugs. Smith's investigation leads him to Fort Detrick, where a researcher, Dr Laura Taylor, had been at tempting to create a drug to wipe memory from soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. But Dr Taylor's research was suspended almost a year ago, when she was placed in a mental institution. Now, if Smith doesn't figure out the brainwas hing drug, and track down the kidnapped Nick Rendel, the kidnappers will soon have the power to carry out drone strikes anywhere in the world...