Aging spies go back out into the cold

Once upon a time there was a boy who got most of his education by reading in the town library. He read and he read, surrounded by books there and at home, until he went into the Army and started to write as well. He wrote for the Stars and Stripes military newspaper, moved back to civilian life and became a reporter, then a speechwriter for President Eisenhower and other Washington panjandrums, then a covert agent abroad for the CIA. “At the time, it was considered honorable employment,” Charles McCarry told the Washington Post in 1977. “We were on the right side, there’s no question in my mind about that, and I am proud and happy to have done it.”

Ten years of intelligence work have shaped the novels of espionage and adventure this story spinner crafts, works that situate McCarry as the foremost American fabulist of the trade and helped put his four sons through college. “I’ve written for money all my life.... A check is more important than celebrity,” he told the Post in a 1988 interview. Experience as a Washington insider, meanwhile, tinged the nonfiction he wrote concurrently, beginning in 1973 with “Citizen Nader.” A semidetached profile of a true believer just beginning to make a mark, his portrait of Ralph Nader displayed McCarry’s talent for the arresting wisecrack (“Nader was the first stand-up prophet of doom”) and demonstrated that a man obsessed -- humorlessly relentless -- doesn’t make much of a dinner companion.

That could not be said of McCarry, a born raconteur and an insidious wit who once wrote of a bathroom that it strove to be vulgar and achieved the gauche. Also, despite disclaimers, he is a born stylist. He insists that, for him, an ideal style is no style at all. He must be correct, if writing that is understated, lucid, spare and bracing can be so described.

The same adjectives apply to Paul Christopher, the hero of the family saga that has run like a tonic stream through half a dozen of the novels written since 1973 by our Homer of the Central Intelligence Agency. Christopher is understated in manner, deliberate, detached, calm -- at least on the surface -- and chilling to some. Moving through a brash, brutish world of malevolence and deceit, he is imperturbably loyal, controlled, unflinching, unshaken -- or so it seems.

McCarry has tried to stop writing the series since the early 1990s, but “Old Boys” is one more of his welcome relapses, allowing Christopher to rise again. (In case some have forgotten -- or never shared -- those bygone days and ventures, Overlook Press is reissuing McCarry’s old spy-fi thrillers, all featuring large casts, colorful locales, complex plots and punchy action. They are bringing them out in hardcover, which is a pity because paperbacks are better bargains and easier to hold. But never look a gift book in the mouth: Just watch for the paperbacks to follow.)

Spying, like gambling, is an activity in which you never suspend disbelief yet frequently bet your intuition. Christopher does that all the time, professionally and privately, although the two spheres are hard to tell apart. So does Horace Hubbard, his cousin and friend who gets the starring role this time.

Though Hubbard is younger, both men are intelligence agents old enough to be put out to pasture. When Christopher disappears at the outset and then reappears in the form of an urn full of ashes delivered by a Chinese official to the U.S. consulate in Beijing, Hubbard is convinced his missing cousin is still alive. He mobilizes a corporal’s guard of fellow spooks and cutthroats, the Old Boys of the title -- arthritic, pill-popping, wine-sopping septuagenarians. Together they will seek Christopher, who (Hubbard believes) is searching for his 94-year-old mother, the legendary Lori, great horsewoman and custodian of a momentous, mysterious scroll penned in AD 36.

The scroll purportedly holds potentially world-shaking evidence that many covet and that the Old Boys work to secure. They must also winkle out and neutralize a fabulously rich and murderously nutty Arab prince: Ibn Awad, whom Hubbard failed to assassinate years earlier. Awad, determined to wreak revenge on Hubbard and on the monstrous regiment of unbelievers, has issued a fatwa against the agent. But Hubbard has more pressing concerns: Dastardly Awad has got his hands on a dozen small nuclear warheads that will pulverize American cities if the vindictive fanatic is not found quickly and his arsenal liquidated.

Conveniently, the search for the Arab coincides with the search for family and friend. So Hubbard and the others set off on a preemptive counterterrorism caper that takes them from Washington, D.C., to Manaus in Brazil’s Amazon; to Xinjiang in China’s outer reaches; to a Moscow crawling with KGB alumni, local mafiosi and blonds whose legs end near the neck; to Jerusalem, Donegal, Budapest, Vienna, Istanbul, Cairo, Rome, Sofia and desert locales and mountain wastes too numerous to name. It is in one of these places that Christopher reappears and the intrepid cousins, reunited with plucky Lori and their hoary gang, rout the villains and dispose of Awad, his missiles and the scroll, rolling up the story.

All this time, the Baedeker buddies on their globetrotting errantry have been so busy pumping garrulous informants and avoiding a panoply of murderous knaves that they’ve had no time for rubbernecking. But there is plenty of unobtrusive commentary on current political predicaments; there are tidbits of tradecraft and much arcane information on such matters as falconry and the migratory habits of the houbara bustard, a shy desert game bird central to the progression of the yarn. And there’s a wonderfully subversive rereading of the New Testament that could well offend President Bush and religious conservatives.

In “Old Boys,” McCarry’s tangled web of deceptions leads back to 1973, when the format of his first published novel, “The Miernik Dossier,” evoked the files that counterintelligence officers keep on a spy. At that time our author wondered what kind of dossier Roman Empire intelligence services compiled on St. Paul. Three decades later he has sketched one out; that alone is worth the book’s price.

His scrumptious writing carries triumphantly from one climax to another and the plot unfolds with vivid velocity to an explosive end. Except that the end is not the end. Or so one suspects.

To paraphrase what the first Duke of Buckingham said about Homer: Just try him once. If you persist to read, McCarry’s will be all the books you need. *