Summary
Slatewiper
Kate Blackwood, genetic engineering entrepreneur and science advisor to the President, receives a call from an old college friend who asks her help in solving a ghastly epidemic in Tokyo. The unknown disease strikes only Koreans - so far. She agrees to help and with a single telephone call, sets in motion a chain of death and mayhem stretching from San Francisco to Washington D.C., Amsterdam and Japan.
With horror, Kate realizes that her life's work, her dedication to finding genetically engineered cures for ethnic diseases like Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia, has a diabolical double edge. Her company's research, she discovers, has been perverted to produce a strange new genetic weapon that kills by turning people's own chromosomes against them.
This "gene bomb" works by activating an ancient genetic sequence -- a time bomb from the far evolutionaty past -- that resides in every human cell. This antediluvian gene, long mutated into senescence, is 100 per cent fatal if re-awakened -- a true Slatewiper.
Further, she learns that this new weapon can be directed to kill members of specific ethnic groups. To her dismay, she finds that the Daiwa Ichiban Corporation, the Japanese conglomerate that bought her biotech company, has conspired with a supersecret American biological warfare unit to develop the Slatewiper gene into a devastating weapon.
Kate, who is Japanese -American, is shocked when she finds out about medical atrocities committed by Shiro Ishii and the other Japanese medical researchers granted asylum in exchange for their help in producing the deadliest biological weapons--weapons tested on Chinese and Korean civilians as well as on Allied POWs. Their war crimes, covered up by an arrangement of Cold War convenience, rival those of Nazi "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele.
Driven by anger and a deep sense of guilt for making Slatewiper possible, Kate is determined to stop it. For help, she turns to her one-time lover and long-time colleague, Al Thomas, a brilliant wheel-chair-bound scientist who helped her found GenIntron. Thomas is a visiting professor in Amsterdam and out of touch. When Kate threatens to expose the Slatewiper conspiracy on her own, she is first threatened, and then marked for death. Her assassination is assigned to Connor O'Kane, a former Customs Service agent whose family was tortured and killed by terrorists seeking revenge for his undercover successes.
Connor O'Kane is living under an assumed name as part of the government's witness protection program. He operates a sailboat charter business as a front for his real passion in life: seeking revenge against those who killed his wife and toddler son. To enlist his former employer in his quest for retribution, O'Kane has amassed a dossier on agency corruption that reaches into the White House.
He has blackmailed the government into delivering his family's killers into his hands. Unknown to him, he has not only killed those responsible for his family's death, but also other innocent people who have crossed the paths of the corrupt government officials he is blackmailing.to kill These officials concoct a false dossier that identifies Kate as the behind-the-scenes mastermind who directed the killings of O'Kane's family .
But, despite the cleverly faked dossier, O'Kane is suspicious of the assignment to kill Kate and asks too many questions, pressing his government contacts who decide that he, too, has served his purpose and must die.
Kate learns that the gruesome epidemic in Tokyo which launches her into this maelstrom was just a test in preparation to rid Japan once and for all of the Koreans, which so many Japanese see as a pollution and a threat to the purity of their nation.
O'Kane quickly learns that he has been blinded by his obsession for revenge and duped into covering up the illegalities of the Daiwa Ichiban Corporation. Driven by anger and guilt over having killed innocent people, O'Kane races against time, trying to save Kate from the trap he has set to kill her.
The action moves across the Atlantic to Amsterdam and finally to Tokyo as the right-wing neo-nationalist head of the Daiwa Ichiban Corporation prepares to unleash the Slatewiper, not realizing that a processing error has destroyed its ability to discriminate between Koreans and Japanese -- or any other ethnic group. The race becomes one to prevent the extinction of all human life.
