Caught in a Web

I like spiders, but I have no desire to see them doing a number on some poor victim caught in a web. The very idea of a trapped animal disturbs me; yet, I do like books in which people are ensnared, and they're forced to muster every shred of courage and resourcefulness they possess to extricate themselves.

Of course, some of the best fictional "no way out" predicaments involve espionage, and former CIA operations officer and veteran thriller writer Charles McCarry can spin a tangled web of deceit with the best of them. His 2013 book, The Shanghai Factor, doesn't feature series protagonist Paul Christopher, a highly skilled and saintly American agent. Instead, we have a cynical, unnamed 29-year-old narrator, who graduated from an elite college and served with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. Nameless spent months in a hospital recovering from a bomb injury, and it's not clear how much he cares whether he lives or dies. He is now in Shanghai, working as a sleeper agent for "Headquarters" (possibly the CIA).

Espionage for such a spy can proceed like dripping molasses, and Nameless spends 2-1/2 years doing little more than avoiding fellow westerners, improving his Mandarin, and frolicking in bed with a beautiful and mysterious Chinese woman named Mei. Things pick up when Nameless notices tag teams of Chinese following him, and he's grabbed and assaulted. But it's after he's called home to speak to Luther R. Burbank, chief of Headquarters Counterintelligence, whose job is "to finger the bad guy inside every good guy and banish the sinner to outer darkness," that the wheels within wheels really begin to turn. Burbank plays mind games with Nameless before offering him the chance to be "the agent of his own fate." In other words, Luther wants Nameless to act as bait to lure, and then hook, their adversary. When Nameless accepts, Burbank shoos him back to China. Soon Nameless is traveling between Shanghai, New York City, and Washington D.C., plying his tradecraft, meeting lovely women, and playing such subtle espionage games, it's difficult to tell who he, and the enigmatic others, are really working for—the Chinese intelligence agency (Guoanbu) or the American Headquarters.

The Shanghai Factor is a mostly cerebral, rather than a high-octane, espionage thriller. It contains complex characters, vivid writing, and witty observations. The plot's action takes place during periods of tense quiet that are punctuated with spine-chilling moments of danger. There's an overall atmosphere of ambiguity and menace. Living as a spook under cover in hostile territory leads to justifiable paranoia. Nameless says, "You can never be a fish swimming in their sea, you are always the pasty-white legs and arms thrashing on the surface with a tiny unheeded cut on your finger. Meanwhile the shark swims toward the scent of blood from miles away." Watching the valiant Nameless use his brains to navigate perilous waters, in which no one can be trusted completely, makes a very satisfying read.

Not all of the pitfalls crime fiction writers devise are outside their characters' skins. Some poor protagonists are victimized, not only by evildoers, but by their own minds as well. This is the case for narrator Bryan Bennett in The Worst Thing, a 2011 standalone thriller by Aaron Elkins, well known to many of us as the author of the Edgar Award-winning "Skeleton Detective" series, featuring forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver.

We meet Bryan, his wife Lori, and his Odysseus Institute boss, Wally North, at a restaurant, where they're celebrating Bryan and Lori's tenth wedding anniversary. Shoving aside his dessert, Wally offers Bryan and Lori a trip to Reykjavik, Iceland. He wants Bryan to present their corporate-level kidnapping and extortion seminar to the executives of an Icelandic fisheries corporation, GlobalSeas. GlobalSeas CEO Baldur Baldursson, who previously escaped a clumsy kidnapping attempt by members of Project Save the Earth, specifically asked for Bryan, the former hostage negotiator who created the crisis management and security policies program.

Lori is thrilled by the idea, but Bryan refuses. He explains to us that "each life has a defining moment, an episode that shapes and colors, for good or ill, all that follows." Bryan's defining moment came more than 30 years ago. When he was five years old, he was kidnapped in Turkey and held, chained in a dungeon, for two months. As a result, Bryan struggles with claustrophobia, nightmares, and occasional nighttime panic attacks. He's also convinced that he'll get himself kidnapped again. Sitting in a cramped airplane cabin and speaking to a group in Iceland about kidnapping is definitely not something Bryan wants to do.

He does it, however, for Lori's sake, setting into motion a terrific twisting-and-turning chain of events, in which the determined kidnappers writer Elkins has already kindly introduced to us get a chance to meet Baldur, Lori, and ... Bryan.

I don't mean to imply that The Worst Thing is a comic caper in the style of Donald E. Westlake, because it has some thought-provoking themes. Bryan conveys the long-term consequences of traumatic events, the troubling nature of memory, and the debilitating nature of panic attacks and their treatment very clearly. Despite these serious subjects, this book is fun. Colorful villains and sympathetic nice guys, unusual settings, a nice sense of irony, and sly plotting are all here. Elkins knows how to tell a story, and suspense builds to a nifty surprise ending. The travails of brave Bryan Bennett in Iceland would make a great hammock read this summer.

Sleeping Dogs Lie

By coincidence, I was listening to the audiobook of Robert Littell's The Company: A Novel of the CIA when the new FX series, The Americans, debuted. What with listening to the one and watching the other, I'm starting to look at people on the street from a whole new angle.

Littell's book is a doorstopper: 896 pages; 34.5 hours on audio. Littell manages to make a story about the CIA entirely human by turning it into a sort of family saga. Yale University undergrads and best friends Jack McAuliffe, Leo Kritzky and Ebby Ebbitt are recruited to "The Company," the successor to the World War II OSS, right after its inception. The book follows them through their marriages, the births of their children and the entry by some of their children into the CIA as well.

The story begins in Berlin, at the start of the Cold War, and we take a time-and-distance trip through some of the key moments in the intelligence war: Budapest during the 1956 anti-Communist Hungarian uprising, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Russian war in Afghanistan, and the 1991 attempted right-wing coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Littell blends fiction so well with these historical events that I kept going back to Wikipedia and historical reference books to see where the seams were between fact and fiction.

Budapest during the 1956 uprising

As the book follows the trio of friends and their long careers in the CIA, parallel threads follow key KGB agents on the other side of the intelligence war, and the search for Sasha, the code name for a KGB mole whom the CIA believes has infiltrated its upper echelons. Even when compared to the spectacular world events depicted, the story of undercover agents and tradecraft are gripping. On the KGB side, the legendary figure of Starik coordinates espionage in the US. He recruits Yevgeny Tsipin, the son of a Soviet diplomat stationed at the UN, to become a deep cover agent. Yevgeny, having gone to high school in New York and college at Yale (where he was acquainted with Jack, Ebby and Leo), speaks English with a New York accent and is completely familiar with the American lifestyle.

Yevgeny (Gene in his new persona) isn't given the job of intelligence gathering directly. Instead, he acts as a "cutout," an agent who picks up intelligence from moles and passes it on to Starik. Gene occasionally works with some Americans who are ideologically committed to the USSR, such as the liquor store owner who allows Gene to act as a deliveryman, so that he can make contacts with moles. But Gene's only regular contact with someone who knows he is a KGB agent is his own cutout agent, Ada Tannenbaum. In the decades Gene is in the US, about once a year he hears a coded message on the radio that puts him in contact with Mrs. Tannenbaum, who moves to a new apartment after each contact. He telephones her and she acts as the information exchange between him and Starik.

The Blaine House in Washington in 1960

Despite her minor role in the book, Ada Tannenbaum is one of its most poignant characters. She'd been a Communist in Poland during World War II, and her young son was murdered before her eyes by the Nazis during a raid. This only intensified her commitment to communism and, when she came to the US as a refugee after the war, her sole occupation was to act as a cutout agent for the KGB. Posing as a widow on a small pension, she lives in a succession of small apartments in Washington, DC. She comes to treasure her rare contacts with Gene and to love him as if he were her own lost son.

It's one thing to be a mole. At least the mole is directly involved in intelligence on a day-to-day basis and lives in that world. The sleeper or deep cover agent, on the other hand, has to pretend to live an ordinary American life, but without revealing anything of his real identity to any of the people with whom he regularly comes into contact. While it's certainly a precarious and sometimes dangerous life, the intense loneliness and untethered-ness may be more of a hardship than the danger. Over the decades he spends as a deep cover agent in the US, Yevgeny/Gene has no direct contact with anyone back in Russia, including his family and the young woman he fell in love with and was forced to leave behind, without explanation, when he received his assignment to go to the US. Ada Tannenbaum makes no friends in America either, and only after many years decides that the Party would not object to her adopting a stray cat. Yevgeny/Gene and Ada Tannenbaum have little other than their ideological commitment––and their brief and rare telephone conversations––to sustain their spirits.

Anna Chapman

You might remember the sensational news stories in 2010 about the dozen Russian sleeper agents who were arrested by the FBI after living as ordinary Americans for many years. The agent who got the media all worked up was Anna Chapman, a femme fatale, but the other agents included several couples whom the Russians put together to act as husband and wife in the US. The agents were instructed to lead ordinary, middle-class lives, but also to work to make contacts within the US government, so that they could pass on intelligence about US foreign policy to their Russian handlers.

This real-life story was the inspiration for the new FX network series, The Americans, which was created by Joe Weisberg, a former CIA agent. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys play Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, to all appearances an ordinary Washington, DC suburban couple with a son and daughter. But they are actually deep cover agents who were recruited to the KGB at a very young age and rigorously trained for their lives in the US. Complete strangers when paired up by the agency, they were instructed always to call each other by their American first names, to speak only English––even when alone with each other––and never to share their real identities or life stories with each other.

The show is set in the early 1980s, a time when the USSR was still intact and the Cold War was still going on, but when the Soviet system was in decline. We follow Philip and Elizabeth's espionage work––like chasing down and abducting defectors, seducing high-level government employees and their loved ones to gain intelligence from them, and planting bugs in homes and offices––but we also see their cover lives.

Philip and Elizabeth go to their children's school events, shopping at the mall and all the usual suburban family activities. When they drop in on their new neighbors, the Beemans, to introduce themselves and give them some of Elizabeth's freshly-baked brownies, they discover that Stan Beeman is an FBI agent. Well, FBI agents have to live somewhere, so maybe it's not an ominous sign, Elizabeth remarks.

While most of the real-life agents who were the subjects of the Illegals Project, as it was known at the FBI, looked only too ordinary and didn't seem to have accomplished much, Elizabeth and Philip are a different story. Their agent jobs seem quite a bit more action-packed than those of the real-life agents in the Illegals Project, but I suppose that's to be expected for a television series. The action part of the show is interesting enough but, as with The Company, it's the way that a life of secrets affects the characters as people that is the most intriguing part of the story.

Imagine the cognitive dissonance of having to pretend, even to your own children, to be an ordinary American, while your true allegiance is to a country on the other side of the world––a country that is the sworn enemy of the US. Imagine never being able to speak your own native language, eat the food you grew up with or observe any of your old customs. Imagine growing up a member of the Soviet Young Pioneers, and now pledging allegiance to the United States at your children's school.

How is it possible for a deep cover agent to sustain his commitment? In Elizabeth's case, pure ideological fervor and patriotism seem to be enough, at least so far. She finds Americans "soft" and believes that the US would destroy her beloved homeland if at all possible. Philip, on the other hand, enjoys the life they've made in the country where the electricity nearly always works and anybody can buy cowboy boots at a shopping mall. As the tasks assigned to them become far riskier, he wants to at least discuss the possibility of defecting. How will the couple work this out, especially when it's not entirely clear whether they're a real husband and wife, or just each other's cover?

I recommend The Company and The Americans to anyone who shares my fascination with people living double lives.

"How was your day, dear?"

We've all had bad days at work. But you know what? It could be worse. For some thriller protagonists, a day on the job can be a threat to life and limb.

In Josh Bazell's Beat the Reaper, Peter Brown is an intern at Manhattan's crummiest hospital. Bazell was an intern himself when he wrote the book and it shows. It's delirious with sleep deprivation and filled with a clinically detailed violence I've never seen anywhere else.  Peter's lousy day begins even before he gets to the hospital:

"So I'm on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me! Naturally there's a gun. He comes up behind me and sticks it into the base of my skull. It's cold and it actually feels sort of good, in an acupressure kind of way.

. . .

The rat and the pigeon run away. Chickenshits.

I turn around, which rolls the gun off my skull and leaves my raised right hand above the fuckhead's arm. I wrap his elbow and jerk upwards, causing the ligaments to pop like champagne corks.

Let's take a moment to smell the rose known as the elbow."

Then follows a paragraph explaining the anatomy of the elbow, along with a footnote (believe it!) about the anatomy of the lower leg and the handy information that you can actually take out most of your fibula and still be able to walk "as long as you don't fuck up the ankle or the knee."

But Peter's bad day really begins to hit its stride when he enters the room of a new patient with an almost certainly fatal case of stomach cancer. The new patient, Nick LoBrutto, and Peter recognize each other. Once upon a time, Peter Brown was Pietro Brnwa of West Orange, New Jersey. After his Holocaust-survivor grandparents are brutally murdered, Peter is on a mission to find out who killed them. He befriends a schoolmate whose father is in the mob so that he can make a deal with the father to get the information about the killers' identities. Nothing is for free in that world so, after he exacts his revenge, he's not surprised that the father recruits him to be a hit man.

But now, years later, Pietro is Peter and his old life is far behind him. Until LoBrutto shows up and makes him an offer he can't refuse: keep me alive or I tell your old friends about you. The novel plays out over the course of Peter's shift, which becomes increasingly er, fraught shall we say, what with hitmen, accidental hypodermic sticks, and an egomaniacal surgeon (redundant, I know) who is determined to amputate the leg of a young woman although Peter knows, just knows, it isn't necessary.

As if all that isn't enough, author Bazell throws in flashbacks to Peter's Pietro Brnwa life, and segues into the history of the Italian and Russian mobsters in the tri-state area, well-deserved critiques of the US medical system, and information about Auschwitz today. Some critics thought that all this, along with the many medical footnotes, was just too much; a rookie author mistake of self-indulgent excess. But all the insanity, angry disquisitions and pulp style make for a heck of a carnival ride and as a bonus you get a heartfelt novel with a protagonist you can care about, even if he's also a fuckhead. It's exciting to know that a followup novel is due to be published early in 2012.

If you've ever worked at a downtown office building, you know the drill. You join the human current pouring off the subway and down the sidewalk, veering into the corner coffee shop for an overpriced café latté so you can avoid the liquid pencil shavings at work. Clutching your cup (Caution: contents are hot), you head into the lobby and over to the elevator banks. On the elevator, you stare at the wall panel, careful to avoid eye contact. The floor buttons light up, higher and higher, until—bing—you reach your floor. As the doors slide open, you step out onto the low-pile neutral carpeting and enter that hermetically sealed world of ringing phones, cubicles, and offices designed to subtly convey exact hierarchies. You make your way to your designated place and begin serving your day's term.

Dave Elliot, protagonist of Joseph R. Garber's Vertical Run, is one of those guys they used to call Masters of the Universe. Former military and now an EVP in Manhattan, with an 800-square-foot office. Dave likes to keep in shape by getting up early, going for a run and then showering in his en suite office bathroom, dressing in one of the many suits hanging in his office's walk-in closet.

This day seems like any other. Dave has just finished knotting his tie and is sipping his coffee when his colleague Bernie Levy steps in. What's different about Bernie this morning? A couple of things. His eyes are red, and he looks exhausted and shaky. Oh, and he has a nickel-plated pistol in his hand, pointed straight at Dave's chest. Thank goodness for hot coffee and quick reflexes, which allow Dave to splash Bernie in the face, jump forward and grab the gun, while kneeing Bernie in the groin and then knocking him out with the pistol grip.

I don't know what this is about, Dave thinks, but it's probably a good idea to bug out of here. Uh oh, two linebacker-ish guys in the hallway. Dave didn't get to the top of the corporate world by being a dummy. He almost—almost—outsmarts these guys. The almost means he escapes in a hail of bullets, not in a quiet stroll and some elevator Muzak. Makes it to the lobby, where he spots more gunmen. But that's not what tells him that his day's suck-o-meter level is still rising. It's the fact that his wife, Helen, is standing with those hard-eyed men and, when she spots him, she points and shouts: "That's him! There! There he is! Get him!"

All this happens in the first 13 pages of Vertical Run. From there on out it's an adrenaline-filled three days as Dave Elliot tries to find out what made him the target of just about everybody he lays eyes on. Vertical Run is one of the most thrilling thrillers I've ever read, with a plot so outlandish and cartoonishly violent you have to laugh even while your heart is pounding. The real mystery is why it never made it to film. I can just see Bruce Willis playing Dave Elliot.

In James Grady's Six Days of the Condor, protagonist Ronald Malcolm is much luckier than Peter Brown and Dave Elliot. Malcolm makes it all the way to lunch before his day goes completely to hell. Malcolm works for the CIA, in an undercover office in Washington, DC, where he spends his days analyzing the plots of crime and espionage fiction. (Hey, nobody ever told me that was a career option.) One rainy day, Malcolm effectively draws the short straw and goes out to get lunch for everybody. He returns to find all his colleagues shot dead.

When Malcolm calls the CIA panic line, giving his Condor code name, that only leads to an attempt on Malcolm's life. Now on the run, Malcolm knows he can trust nobody in his quest to solve his own crime story. Six Days of the Condor did make it to film. Hollywood's well-known impatience turned it into Three Days of the Condor. Washington turned into New York City and Ronald Malcolm turned into Joe Turner, played by Robert Redford. It was the 1970s, one of the dark nights of this nation's soul, and the reasons for the hit at the office turned out to be far darker, more cynical and paranoid in the movie than in the book.

No matter how bad their workdays were, Peter Brown, Dave Elliot and Ronald Malcolm were protagonists, meaning they were still alive at the end of the day. Work can be a more literal killer when you're not the protagonist.

People who work in creative fields have a talent for death on the job. Advertising copywriter Victor Dean tumbles down a flight of stairs in Dorothy L. Sayers's Murder Must Advertise. Australian opera singer Gaylene Ffrench is electrocuted in Robert Barnard's Death On the High C's. In Kerry Greenwood's Ruddy Gore, a revival of Gilbert & Sullivan's Ruddigore turns His Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne into a kill zone, with two actors poisoned and another found dead in her dressing room. Another dressing-room death befalls the despised opera singer Edwin Shorthouse in Edmund Crispin's Swan Song. We could spend all day talking about murder on the job in the theater and other artistic venues.

Solicitor's deed box

But to return to more prosaic workplaces, how about the accountant strangled by the cord of his adding machine during an audit in Emma Lathen's Accounting for Murder? And let's take one of my old stomping grounds: the law firm. In Susan Wolfe's award-winning The Last Billable Hour, a name partner of a flashy Silicon Valley law firm in the go-go 1980s is stabbed to death at the office. Even that seems better than the fate of Mr. Smallbone, client of the law firm of Horniman, Birley & Craine in Michael Gilbert's Smallbone Deceased. Mr. Smallbone is found, weeks dead, in a sealed deed box in the office of the firm's recently deceased name partner Abel Horniman. Unexplained is whether Smallbone was an unusually diminutive man, as his name would suggest, or the deed box was particularly large.

Thinking all this over, when you get home from work tonight, won't you just be grateful you're still upright and nobody tried to stab you, gun you down, poison or electrocute you or find some even more colorful way of finishing you off?

Why don't we all take a deep breath and say: Thank God it's Friday!