Robert Ludlum's The Moscow Vector: A Covert-one Novel

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Wheeler Pub., 2005 - Fiction - 709 pages
At an international conference in Prague, Lt. Col. Jon Smith, an Army research doctor specializing in infectious diseases and secretly an agent attached to Covert-One, is contacted by a Russian colleague, Dr. Valentine Petrenko. Petrenko is concerned about a small cluster of mysterious deaths in Moscow and about the Russian government's refusal to release publicly any information or data on the outbreak. When the two meet, they are attacked by a group of mysterious men and Petrenko is killed. His notes and medical samples are lost, and Smith barely escapes with his life. At the same time, a series of government officials around the world are coming down with a mysterious, fast-acting virus with a 100% fatality rate. These deaths are somehow related to the increasing militarism from the new Russian government, headed by the autocratic and ambitious President Victor Dudarev. With few clues and precious little time, Smith and Covert-One must unravel this mysterious plot and find the mysterious figure who stands at the center of it all.

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About the author (2005)

Robert Ludlum was born May 25, 1927 in New York City. He enlisted in the Marines at the age of eighteen and received a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1951. He began acting professionally at the age of sixteen in the 1943 Broadway production of Junior Miss. He also had roles in summer stock and appeared in over 200 television dramas for such live programs as Studio One and Kraft Television Theater. He then tried producing with the 1956 Broadway production of The Owl and the Pussycat. He took the play, four years later, to his creation of Shopping-Center Theater at Playhouse-on-the-Mall in Paramus, New Jersey. His first novel, The Scarlatti Inheritance, was published in 1971. His other works include The Matlock Paper, The Chancellor Manuscript, The Bourne Identity, The Scorpio Illusion, The Matarese Countdown, and The Bancroft Strategy. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd. He died on March 12, 2001 at the age of 74.

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