Viral - Hardcover

In remote pockets of the Third World, a deadly virus is quietly sweeping through impoverished farming villages and shanty towns with frightening speed and potency. Meanwhile, in Washington, a three-word message left in a safe-deposit box may be the key to stopping the crisis—if, that is, Charles Mallory, a private intelligence contractor and former CIA operative, can decipher the puzzle before time runs out.

What Mallory begins to discover are the traces of a secret war, with a bold objective—to create a new, technologically advanced society. With the help of his brother Jon, an investigative reporter, can he break the story to the world before it is too late—before a planned “humane depopulation” takes place?

As the stakes and strategies of this secret war become more evident, the Mallory brothers find themselves in a complex game of wits with an enemy they can’t see: a new sort of superpower led by a brilliant, elusive tactician who believes that ends justify means.

James Lilliefors is an award-winning journalist and former newspaper editor who has written forThe Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald and elsewhere. He was raised in the Washington, D.C. area and studied at the University of Iowa and the University of Virginia, where he was a Henry Hoyns Fiction Writing Fellow. He currently lives in Florida and is at work on the follow-up toViral.