MI6 agent Sam Packer watches powerlessly as a trouble-making gunrunner is shot down in front of him on a lonely road in Zambia. As life slips from his grasp the arms smuggler whispers a heart-stopping warning to Sam: a terrorist gang has a horror weapon and means to commit mass murder. But the man dies before naming the gang, its nationality or its cause. And is the weapon nuclear, chemical or biological? The world's intelligence agencies are desperate to know. Packer has his own ideas about how to crack the case and is convinced that Julie, the gunrunner's daughter, is somehow involved. A virologist working in a London hospital, Julie denies all knowledge of her father's devious affairs. She suspects Packer to be her father's murderer and plots to destroy the MI6 man's career. A bomb explodes in an Asian quarter of London . . . Anti-racism officials succumb to an unidentified virus . . . A Royal Navy submarine discovers a germ warfare lab on an Adriatic island . . . Disconnected events whose relevance is unclear until ghosts from his past send Packer to Vienna on the trail of an ex-Stasi spy. But the key still lies with Julie. Only by winning her confidence can Packer break the ring of silence and penetrate to the heart of the sinister organization known as The Lucifer Network.