The Dagger Outbreak

An ancient virus. A modern pandemic. A world on the brink of war.

In a sealed tomb in southern Sweden, an entire community was laid to rest in a single generation. Five thousand years later, Professor Elizabeth Crawford is flown out to find out why.

What she finds is not a disease. It is something built: part virus, part fungus, belonging to no kingdom of life on earth. It kills three in four of the people it infects. The survivors it rewrites - and the changes pass to their children.

Four days after she arrives, armed men storm the dig.

Mason Shaw should have died in Afghanistan in 2008. He walked away from an ambush that killed everyone else in his patrol, with thirteen fractures and a body that healed itself in days. Someone in London knew about it before he did. Eighteen years on, he leads Dagger, an elite unit serving an organization older than any nation on the map - one that has spent millennia collecting the knowledge it considers too dangerous for the rest of us.

As the pathogen reaches a shopping center in Germany and begins to spread, Mason and Elizabeth are pulled into a shadow war across three continents. The trail runs through a Nazi submarine manifest, a prisoner held in a cell since 1946, a labyrinth beneath the palace of Knossos, and a black fortress on a frozen Canadian island that was already ancient when the ice came.

And every time they get close to the truth, someone inside their own organization sends Mason somewhere else.

Governments are falling. The borders are closing. Somewhere behind it all, a plan set in motion long before any of them were born is running exactly to schedule.

Atlantis, it turns out, was no myth. It was a warning.

The Dagger Outbreak is the first book in the Dagger series: a relentless, intelligent thriller for readers of James Rollins, Steve Berry and Matthew Reilly.