Growing Up Political in Chicago : FIREBIRD<i> by James Carroll (E.P. Dutton: $18.95; 439 pp.) </i>

Any bookstore worth its bindings will have a big window display of James Carroll’s “Firebird” in place in time for the presidential inauguration. If winter weather isn’t enough to set you shivering, this political thriller will cause a frisson to run up even the most patriotic spine. What’s the last thing you want to hear as the ex-director of the CIA takes the helm of a kinder, gentler ship of state? That the boys who run the intelligence community are--holy red telephone!--mere mortals who are capable of trading away their countrymen’s very lives to carry out a personal vendetta.

Carroll, who has dealt with the dilemmas of integrity and patriotism before, notably in “Prince of Peace” (1985) and “Supply of Heroes” (1986), cushions this revelatory blow a bit by setting his story back in the post-World War II FBI, but that’s thin comfort, given what he has to say. His hero, Chris Malone, is a boyish idealist cut from the same Midwestern mold as last season’s cinematic Eliot Ness: A dreamy Irish kid who grows up near the Chicago stockyards and yearns for a job with the FBI, far from his drunken locksmith of a father. He wants an upstanding, imposing dad like J. Edgar Hoover; if he can’t have one at home, going to work for one is the next best thing.

Malone is just another anonymous Kansas City agent when the call comes from Washington: The Russians have managed to get hold of American atomic bomb secrets, and the FBI has to find out how. Webb Minot, one of Hoover’s top men, wants Malone to break into the safe at the Russian embassy and copy the contents of a code book that will enable the Bureau to translate crucial coded messages and find the spy. Minot has concocted a phony identity for Malone as one Peter Ward, a low-level Foreign Service officer who comes completely equipped with an exotic, mysterious Russian wife named Anna. All Malone has to do is pretend to be Peter Ward long enough to steal the goods, and he’s a big hero.

Or so he thinks. The real intrigue, of course, starts after he gets the code book--or rather, when he enters the code room at the embassy and discovers that someone has made his job a bit too easy. From that moment on, Carroll’s novel is a juggernaut of cynicism and amorality, driven by men who exhibit the kind of steely, inhuman resolve that can so easily be mistaken for selflessness. It wouldn’t be fair to give away the final unraveling of the Firebird plan--but it suggests that even men of supposed good will, men entrusted with our national security, fall prey to a peculiarly dangerous paradox. Although they are no different, no better, than anyone else, they have a distressing tendency to think that they can play God.

To stick with “Firebird,” you have to be one of those people who are fascinated by the machinations of evil bureaucrats. Carroll comes up with an exhausting supply of dead ends, false leads, double and triple crosses, and outright lies for his hero to untangle. For, lest we dismiss his tale as paranoia without purpose, the author reminds us that this is a coming-of-age story, as much as it is a political thriller. Malone has to work his way through the maze--as he all too frequently reminds us--to discover, not just the truth about the FBI, but the truth about himself.

Carroll has a heavy hand when it comes to the psychological aspects of his story; maybe he’s worried that the reader, head reeling from the Russian-American-British intrigues, will miss the sub-text. He sets up Malone’s early affection for Minot well enough, but then feels compelled to relate every incremental slippage of that affection as Malone moves, inexorably, toward enlightenment. The pace gets sludgy, and what is meant as an emotional signpost begins to seem like a distraction.

And the enigmatic Anna is the definitive literary onion: Malone keeps peeling and peeling, but there’s always more to find out, always one more layer to her complex tale. Luckily, Anna has one attribute that Beth, the wan little sweetheart that Malone left behind, didn’t seem to possess: Anna is a knockout. Whenever Malone’s energy starts to lag, he and Anna have a rousing sexual encounter, and somehow he finds the strength to go on.

The pay-off is nicely complex, if dated. If this were a movie (and the specificity of some of the locations does seem like a hopeful hint to any producers who might pick up the book), the audience would likely cheer the hero’s epiphany. The only question is: Would they get as far as the parking lot before they started to worry about who runs the show after the honorable fellows have packed their bags? Good thing “Firebird” is fiction.