A former Russian GRU scientist terrorizes CIA, FBI and DEA agents with a weapon of mass destruction...a thrombotoxin for which he alone is immune. The U.S. government goes postal... (117 pages)

SYNOPSIS:

Yuri is a Special Laboratory 100 GRU scientist in 1980s Russia. He is happily in love, but unhappy living under the oppressive Soviet régime. He dreams of giving his wife a better life in America, so he provides information to the CIA on a lethal toxin found in a plant in a remote area of a South American jungle where little else survives but giant armadillos. The scientist were working on developing the toxin as a weapon of mass destruction but failure to develop an easy and reliable means to immunize the troops against it arrested any further development. Any physical contact or breathing it can kill higher life-forms — and it is the grisliest of deaths. In moments, the body is blackened, victims choke as their lungs solidify...their eyes becoming black marbles...their blood clotting immediately into a mass of necrotic tissue.

Yuri takes his wife, a diplomatic interpreter, to a Christmas Party at the US Embassy in Moscow. He has a nasty wound on his had from an accident with the toxin and is treated there by a young US military captain, a doctor who is on an exchange program designed to teach both countries that they are people with the same frailties rather than enemies with none. Dr. Eric West gives Yuri his card and invites him to get in touch with him if he comes to the States. Yuri is delighted.

Meanwhile, over at CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia, Paul Atchity is a very stressed man. His new Colombian wife has maxed out his cards, and now she’s demanding yet more money to help her mother. What with the alimony payments to his first wife, he’s in a squeeze. He decides to sell secrets to the Russians. It’ll just be this one time, he tells himself. One of the secrets he reveals is that there is a mole named Yuri Stieglitz working at ‘Special Laboratory 100’. Atchity is arrested two years later and thrown in jail for treason. It will take years for Yuri to discover the truth about his wife's death.

The KGB goes after Yuri. He rushes home in time to see his wife falling from the 18th floor, tossed through the glass of the window by two agents sent to ransack their home. Her body impacts a car, severing her head, the impact bouncing the car in the air. Witnessing such horror drives Yuri insane. In despair, he becomes a homeless tramp, until one day he saves the life of Boris, a Russian mafia boss. Boris takes him into his organization and as the years go by he becomes his right-hand man, eventually succeeding as the head honcho in the early 1990s. Boris is ultimately killed by Tolkachev, a rival mafia boss. Yet again Yuri mourns the loss, throwing him back into despair.

With the fall of the U.S.S.R Yuri begins to investigate his wife's murder. He discovers that the CIA had betrayed him, resulting his Maria's death. Yuri goes back to the now abandoned Special Laboratory 100 and recovers a lyophilized vial of the toxin he had hidden there. Secretly he builds immunity to the toxin through applying successive increasing doses all over his body. The pain is excruciating. Ulcer, by ulcer he increases his resistance to the toxin until he is completely immune. He uses the toxin to kill Tolkachev and leaves the business to Oleg, his second, to build another business in the U.S. Once there, he looks up the kind doctor who treated his first wound and they become close friends. The years go by as Yuri implements his plan. He places the toxin all over the United States in critical, highly populated areas, ready to be released by a single push of a button. His revenge for his betrayal and the death of his wife will be historic. The Americans will pay. Their system will pay. But first, he sets out to take out the critical players...his former handlers.

Suddenly former CIA agents and FBI agents are found dead... Dr. West remembers seeing similar bodies years ago in Moscow, inspecting the bodies of a group of mafia men found in an abandoned warehouse. Their bodies looked exactly the same. And now, years later when, now a Lieutenant-Colonel and head of the Combat Casualty Research Centre in the U.S., he comes across another set of dead bodies of similar appearance after a failed DEA operation in Colombia. Then blackened bodies start showing up in the US. Hundreds of bodies, but they discover at the center of each incidence is a former CIA operative. Dr. West heads to Russia in search of answers.

He meets with Yuri’s former boss who secretly gives him a sample of the toxin. Back home, Dr. West’s team work on an antidote, but it may take years. As more and more blackened deaths occur, Dr. West figures out Yuri is the perpetrator and finds his hit-list: all the men who betrayed him. He warns the next man on the list and an elaborate sting operation is mounted. It goes wrong, but Dr. West catches up with Yuri. He has planted boxes of the toxin in every major city and he can detonate them with a pager in his brief case. A button placed near the handle. As he talks to Dr. West, the authorities shoot the briefcase out of his hands and riddle both it and Yuri with bullets. The toxin... Did he release the toxin... How many will die... My God...is this the end...

Screenplay is an adaptation of the book, Terminal Cascade.