Ludlum is an acknowledged master of spy thrillers and intrigue, another favorite genre of mine. I haven’t read any for several years, but got started on this one, and became caught up in the levels of deception. Nick Bryson is a top agent for a super-secret agency called the Directorate. He is retired after a deep-cover operation goes awry and is given a new identity as professor in a small college. Several years later, his former agent instincts still intact, he realizes he is being shadowed by other agents apparently determined to kidnap him — at least that’s his initial impression. He eludes their trap, only to be approached more civilly by their boss, the head of the CIA, who has a fantastic story to tell. It appears that Bryson had been working for a Russian mole operation that recruited American citizens for super- secret operations that were supposedly in the American national interest: the Directorate. The CIA discovered this hidden agency only after examination of files following the fall of the Soviet Union. Bryson is stunned and agrees to work for the CIA to determine what the Directorate is now planning; evidence has mounted they are still operating and planning some kind of major action. (Ludlum never explains how Bryson could just vanish from his college, but, as with most books in this genre, a certain suspension of belief is necessary. Bryson is also the luckiest man alive because he happens to notice things just before his head is about to get blown off. He should have been a professional gambler; the way he beats the odds, he could have been rich at much less risk.) In a rush to get at the truth and to prevent the machinations of the Directorate, or is it another even more secret organization, Prometheus, he flits from one country to another, followed by assassins and tragedies: anthrax in Vienna, exploding passenger trains, crashing airliners, massive surveillance of everything we do. As it turns out, the Directorate is one of the good guys, but in one of those ironies so typical of these great conspiracy theory books, the good guys have to rely on the web of surveillance networks and hidden conspiracies to prevention of takeover of the world by bad guys who want to legalize the kind of surveillance the Directorate relies on to get the bad guys. I don’t think you can have it both ways. To finally gather the evidence they need, Elena and Nick manage to read through practically the entire British Library in about two hours, something that strained my credulity.
Ludlum seems to have as his theme the dangers of a wired world with its potential for destruction of privacy, but this one lacks the subtlety of his earlier books. But if you like James Bond movies and are willing to suspend reality, you’ll love this book.
