Robert Ludlum's The Cassandra Compact (Covert-One Series #2) » (Unabridged)

When he died in March 2001, Robert Ludlum had become not only a veteran suspense author, but a reliable bestseller franchise. His plots involving high-level corruption and global conspiracy are like entering labyrinths; and readers keep coming back to get lost.

Someone is trying to steal Russia's store of a long-vanquished deadly disease, and Lt. Colonel Jon Smith, with the help of Covert-One, must stop the conspirators before they loose Armageddon upon the world.

Lt. Col. Jon Smith, a medical researcher, is contacted by Russian colleague with a strange request that he meet him in Venice in ten days. When he does so, no sooner does Smith sit down than his colleague is killed by a hail of bullets. But not before he passes on to Smith intelligence that someone is about to steal some of Russia's stash of the smallpox virus. A long-vanquished disease, smallpox only exists in storage at two research centers, one in the US and one in Russia. Smallpox, however, is astonishingly virulent and there isn't nearly enough vaccine available should there be an outbreak. Even worse, the vaccine stores on hand are very old.

At the request of Covert-One - an agency so secret and loosely organized that it has no building, no org chart, no salaries, and reports only to the sitting President, Jon Smith starts to track down who is after the smallpox vaccine and find out what they plan to do with it. But his adversaries are several steps ahead of him. They have already spirited the vaccine out of the heavily guarded research center and are bringing it to a research lab where they will genetically alter it to create one of the most deadly chemical weapons ever. With a cabal of generals and key figures in the military industrial complex working to develop the weapon, Smith must find and stop the conspirators before they loose Armageddon upon the world.

Publishers Weekly

Ludlum continues to imitate his imitators in his second Covert-One biotech thriller (after The Hades Factor), this time with coauthor Shelby (Days of Drums, etc.). Medical researcher and sometime spy Lt. Col. Jonathan Smith aided by CIA agent Randi Russell, British operative Peter Howell and ultrasecret spymaster Nathaniel Klein faces another villainous plot to unleash a deadly disease on an unsuspecting populace. Retired from the Army Medical Research Unit for Infectious Diseases after the death of his fianc e, Smith heads to Venice to meet a Russian scientist who is killed by Sicilian mercenaries before he can warn Smith that a sample of smallpox is about to be stolen from a Russian bioresearch facility. Up against a global military-corporate conspiracy with moles at NASA, the Pentagon and the KGB, Smith follows the smallpox across the Atlantic to Houston Mission Control and beyond. The cinematic chase through changing landscapes and mounting body count gives the book its rapid pace, while insider politics, tradecraft and technical wizardry lend an extra kick. Boilerplate dialogue ("The hit came down as arranged. But there was an unexpected development. I'm expecting an update shortly") and movie logic (after ordering the space shuttle to land in Nevada with the most virulent smallpox strain ever and several dead astronauts aboard, the president hops Air Force One to go meet it) show Ludlum may leverage his brand name, but no longer delivers the complex situations that earned him his reputation as a premier writer of international intrigue. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.