A school teacher discusses types of government with his class. His students find it too boring to repeatedly go over national socialism and believe that dictatorship cannot be established in modern Germany. He starts an experiment to show how easily the masses can become manipulated.

When four bodies are discovered among the industrial decay and urban grime of New York City, brash young detective Mike Reilly teams with ambitious Department of Health researcher Terry Huston to uncover the cause behind their violent and inexplicable deaths. The only common factor shared by the victims? Each died exactly 48 hours after logging onto a website called feardotcom.