Doctor Peter Branstead's neurology department at St. Mark's Hospital in New York's picturesque Greenwich Village is flooded with a series of critically ill vagrants exhibiting identical symptoms. Confused and agitated upon admission, they rapidly progress into convulsions, cardiac arrest, and death. The deaths are too methodical to be a coincidence, but how-and why-are they being killed? Peter's investigation leads him into a dark underworld of international intrigue and into the center of a plot to destroy the president of the Ukraine, Anatoly Labrinska. Peter learns that his patients have been given a mysterious drug that is also being administered to President Labrinska. But tracking Peter's every move is a savage Ukranian Mafia killer-an assassin so ruthless that the most vicious criminals on two continents live in fear of his wrath. With the political stability of Europe hanging in the balance and the lives of those he loves in jeopardy, Peter desperately works to foil the plot and escape with his life.