Publisher's Synopsis
A vengeful war hero. A politician's wife. A lethal pathogen. Scores to settle.London 2039. The post-Ebola population tolerates each other in two unequal parts. The Cardinal City elite enjoy a life of privilege, comfort and plenty, while those outside forage, hunt and dig for survival. Major Nathan Helix, VC DSO has given twenty years of his life and sacrificed half of his body in service to his country. The price for his rehabilitation is at least ten years further service to the Cardinal of the Eastern Sector. He refuses to accept that his special forces career is over, regarding his promotion, decorations and new life of investigating trivial crime among the city glitterati no substitute. Doctor Gabrielle Stepper, the venerated scientist credited with defeating the Ebola pandemic, craves a life of normality and anonymity. Trapped in a loveless marriage to the ambitious Chancellor of the Exchequer, she seeks solace outside the city in the arms of a fellow member of the Scientific Elite. Her hopes for future happiness are extinguished when her lover is found poisoned with evidence that Stepper was the last person to see her alive. Helix has long admired Stepper and, when assigned to investigate, he refuses to believe her capable of murder. When he also learns that she has discovered a pathogen, equal in virulence to Ebola and someone is trying to steal it, he will do anything to protect her and the research. He foils an attempt to kidnap her, orchestrated by Colonel Terry McGill, his former nemesis and the architect of his older brother's death. With McGill back in his sights and Stepper on the run, Helix is torn between tracking her down, or avenging the death of his sibling under the burgeoning threat of a biological attack with the power to finish the job that Ebola started.
