Hafiz is a twenty-five-year-old Muslim doing post-graduate work in genetics at the University of Beirut. He is one of a team working on the possibility of fashioning a biological weapon that would be effective against some ethnic groups and not others. This project seems to him impossible, but still highly dangerous.Lisa is a sixteen-year-old Israeli girl who feels threatened by the Jewish insistence on dwelling on memories of the Holocaust. She looks for a way out to a future.Maurice Rotblatt is a middle-aged ex-television-guru who comes to the Middle East and calls for a plague on all ethnic and religious belligerants. He then disappears. His friends in England wonder - is he a victim? A trickster? Or has he left hints about some hope for a future?The story ends in September 2001. It is by the capacity to understand the interweaving actions and aspirations of many different characters - in Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, England - that there might be a chance, it seems, for humans to be nudged out of their self-destructive genetic and environmental conditioning.