Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Ron Jordan is enjoying a rare day with his wife and son in their suburban Washington home when the idyll is snatched away by a desperate call from a trusted news source at the Centers for Disease Control. A week earlier, an illegal immigrant had left his family in El Fuerte, Mexico, to find work in the sprawling desert city of Tucson, unaware that he carried a new - possibly manufactured - strain of hemorrhagic fever, an airborne strain of Ebola. With lightning speed, it will take his life, launch the worst pandemic since 1918, and, in immigrant-weary Arizona, ignite an ethnic firestorm.Worried about a financial and health panic, an election-year White House underplays the level of danger. Jordan breaks the story and heads for its epicenter. In Tucson, social order is disintegrating, along with care for the sick and dying. Hate groups gather from around the country to provoke radicalized Latinos into a bloody tit-for-tat while Tucson burns and the disease seeps out beyond Ariona through transportation centers throughout the country. Jordan faces a kill-or-be-killed decision. Afterward, he despises the man whose reflection refuses to meet his eyes in the bathroom mirror.Jordan sees a bright line separating good from evil and, as Ebola. Airborne opens he has no doubt on side he stands. His career is dedicated to exposing wrongdoing in public life. Devoted husband and father, he has all the markers of success. Just not enough to satisfy his ambition. An ambition his wife says that leads him to "dance in the fire." Unwittingly, he takes his son along with him into the flames.