Yuri Danko, an officer in the medical division of Russia's security service, is murdered by a spray of assassin's bullets. Now Covert-One's Jon Smith has Danko's classified papers, and he's unearthed a terrifying global conspiracy. A Serb terrorist has been despatched from Russia to smuggle hazardous vials of a deadly bacteria into the United States. His mission: to deliver them to an unknown US government agent. Then both men are murdered, and the deadly bacteria is stolen... It's up to Lt Col Smith to find the madman who possesses it, before he holds a defenceless world hostage with the power to render the human race extinct.
Amazon Review
In Robert Ludlum's The Cassandra Compact, Covert-One, the president's personal, super-secret agency formed after some recent virus-driven chaos (The Hades Factor, co-written with Gayle Lynds), is staffed by an unknown number of international covert operatives, including Dr Jon Smith, late of the USAMRIID. And a good thing, too, because someone's helped themselves to Russia's share of the world's last two stores of the smallpox virus, an eradicated yet hideously deadly bug with no ready vaccine.
That the pox was nabbed and who nabbed it is clear enough early on. Why such a seemingly large and disparate cadre of global citizens (keeping the players straight puts one in mind of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine) chose to pinch the bug and for what end are the novel's driving questions. Freelance Serbian uber-nasty, Ivan Beria, is among the apparent perpetrators as are Dylan Reed and Adam Treloar of NASA, Tony Price, the head of the super-secret NSA and a bunch of Russians. The good-guys roster claims Smith, Covert-One's head Nathaniel Klein, Briton and ex-SAS man Peter Howell, Smith's deceased girlfriend's sister and CIA operative Randi Russell, the girlfriend's best friend, backup shuttle astronaut Megan Olson and another bunch of Russians. Suffice it to say that Smith and company trot the globe, cat-and-mousing after the pox and in so doing careen through a classically speedy and Ludlumesque (if coincidence dependent) plot leaving large numbers of efficiently dispatched corpses in their wake. --Michael Hudson
Review
Praise for Robert Ludlums The Hades Factor
The new team has a pop hit on their hands that should bounce right up the bestseller list Kirkus Reviews
Library : General
Universes : Covert-One [02]
Formats : EPUB
ISBN : 9781409117728