Stirring the Ingredients in a Recipe for Chaos

From where I sit writing this review, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I can walk to the campus of Columbia University in only five minutes. While I might have to dodge rats and drunken frat boys, it’s hard to imagine that the greatest dangers to my safety are the professors themselves. Yet this is the premise of Jonathan Rabb’s debut thriller, “Overseer.”

There is a plot afoot to destroy the United States. A bomb in the National Gallery, a radar blackout over the Northeast, an assassination. The U.S. State Department’s ultra-secret Committee of Supervision has been tracking the disparate activities of a financier, a children’s education expert and a conservative pundit--and wondering whether they all might be linked to the recent events. To investigate, the committee calls young operative Sarah Trent, the former “assassin of Amman,” out of retirement.

Sarah tries several cold trails before traveling up to Columbia’s Institute of Cultural Research. There she finds Xander Jaspers, a professor of political theory. He is a man of ideas and sugar cookies, a luftmensch who has found a cozy retreat in the workings of the mind, particularly since the early death of his wife. Yet Jaspers is able to provide Sarah with exactly the connection she seeks between the three mysterious men.

The connection is a semi-mythical manuscript titled “On Supremacy.” Purportedly written by a 16th century monk named Eisenreich, “On Supremacy” sets out a list of precepts, much in the manner of Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” The goal: worldwide control. Yet while “The Prince” preaches order, “On Supremacy” neatly sets out a recipe for chaos. “Power clings to those who recognize its discord,” writes Eisenreich in its first chapter, “and who can turn that discord to dominance.”

No modern academic has ever seen “On Supremacy.” But, as Xander tells Sarah, Eisenreich himself was tortured to death for keeping mum about its whereabouts. Torture is the least of their problems. More disasters rain chaos on the country, as the three “prefects” of Eisenreich, led by a shadowy Overseer, begin the final countdown in a schedule of mass disruption. Xander and Sarah race around the world trying to find the manuscript before the final chapter.

Ancient artifacts--the more spurious the better--are superb linchpins for any novel, and Rabb has chosen his well. The late professor Alfred Hitchcock would surely have placed “On Supremacy” high on a shelf in the Department of Maguffin Studies. Inevitably, a document surrounded by as much mystery as “On Supremacy” will look somewhat ordinary in the light of print. In a curious decision, Rabb prints the full text of his manufactured document at the end of his thriller, perhaps to show just how much room there is between the gray lines of theory for men to wreak their mad interpretations.

We are fortunate, in a year of bomb trials and a week of Capitol shootings, that the Overseers of today are paranoid loners from Montana--that humanity, even at Columbia University, is too dim-witted to conspire.