In Trafalger Square the New Year celebration is transformed into a carnival of terror. At Albany prison a rooftop protest ends in violent death. And in The Azores a luxury liner vanishes. These unrelated incidents are linked by the intellect of an aging librarian and woven into a pattern which encompasses the major disasters of two decades. Into this web stumbles a young programmer-analyst with an expertise in weaponry, and with a computer resource which adds new and terrifying element to the pattern - an advance projection of an assassination that will devastate the nation.