Just before he was killed, Osama bin Laden’s and his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, meet with al Qaeda’s Shura Council in an abandoned house in Pakistan. They discuss plans for a new holy war, a large-scale bioterrorism attack on the U.S. For this war, they will partner with their former enemy, the Iranians. The plan includes collecting samples containing infectious agents such as cholera germs from patients seen in hospital emergency rooms in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The samples are then sent to a makeshift laboratory in North Waziristan where the pathogens are propagated and packaged for shipment to the US. Meanwhile, in the US, a network of American-born radicalized teenagers is recruited and deployed as bag boys in supermarkets.
When Winston Sage, MD, an offbeat, retired epidemiologist living in Santa Fe, was asked to serve on a boondoggle State Committee on Bioterrorism, the last thing he could have imagined was that he would unravel al Qaeda’s planned strike on the US; be enlisted by the FBI; and be personally commended by the President at the White House. Sage’s unorthodox thinking clashes with the FBI, but helps abort the attacks—well, almost. $0.99 on Kindle.