Robert Ludlum's The Cassandra Compact

Robert Ludlum's The Cassandra Compact is a thriller published in 2001. It is one of the Covert-One novels.

The book begins with a death. Yuri Danko, an officer in the medical division of Russia's security service, is killed by a spray of assassins' bullets, and the last words he speaks are about a plan he says nobody would have believed.

His classified papers come into the possession of the Covert-One operative Jon Smith and the CIA undercover agent Randi Russell, and what the two of them find in them is a global conspiracy with the potential to set loose a plague of immeasurable proportions.

The weapon involved is a quantity of deadly bacteria, and a Serbian terrorist has already been sent from Russia to carry vials of it into the United States and hand them to an unknown American government agent, whose motives become harder still to understand when both men are discovered murdered and the strain is gone. Smith and Russell have to find it, find whoever now holds it, and stop him before he can hold a defenceless world to ransom with the power to make the human race extinct.