On a quiet late-night flight from Tokyo to London, a beautiful young woman, Kioko McMahon, falls ill. Before the plane can reach emergency medical facilities across the Pacific, she succumbs to her inexplicable symptoms. The mystery deepens when police in Japan discover that her family shared her fate. The only survivor is her rebellious sister, Mayumi, who had run off with her gang-member boyfriend several years before.

Because the late patriarch of the family, Peter McMahon, was the head of one of the world's most important genetic research companies, and a personal friend of the Prime Minister, James Bond is sent to investigate the deaths. 007's quest for answers leads to the surviving sister and to a nest of Yakuza gangsters. Along the way, he uncovers a plot of such monstrous proportions that it could only have been hatched in the mind of a madman.