Espionage spun within blurred moral lines amid war on terrorism

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the late Cold War trend toward moral equivalence in spy novels has been subtly but clearly reversed. The good guys -- CIA agents and their “assets” -- still use means as sleazy and cold-blooded as their enemies do, but the ends once again justify those means without serious question.

“If you don’t act on the rumor [of a terrorist plot] and it turns out to be a reality, people will die in numbers so large that it will change the way historians will write about the century,” a U.S. spymaster says in David Lindsey’s newest thriller, “The Face of the Assassin.” “But if you do act, you do so with the full knowledge that the only way to stop the beast coming after you is to send your own beast out into the night to meet him ... knowing full well that he isn’t any different from or any better than the beast you are sending him out to meet. Except that your beast doesn’t want to eat you, and the other one does.”

The reason for the spymaster’s unwonted introspection is that he wants to recruit Paul Bern, an unsuspecting Texas forensic artist, to replace Jude Teller, a CIA agent murdered in Mexico City by the members of a Hezbollah cell he was trying to infiltrate. CIA assets then killed the killers before word could reach Islamic terrorist mastermind Ghazi Baida. Thus it may be possible to “resurrect” Teller -- a risky gambit. Bern can’t match the agent’s skills, but he has the face for the job. He and Teller were identical twins, though neither knew the other; they had been separated, then abandoned, at birth. Only the CIA has connected them.

In Austin, Bern makes a living reconstructing dead people’s faces from their skulls. A few days before the CIA officially contacts him, one such skull was delivered by a woman who claimed it might be her lover’s, found dead in Mexico City. Her story triggered a strange outburst from Bern’s houseguest, Alice, the 17-year-old daughter of friends, who had been brain-damaged in a boating accident that killed Bern’s wife. Alice has receptive aphasia. Her speech is fluent but meaningless. However, she has acquired an “uncanny ability to sense when someone is lying.” Bern doesn’t know what to make of it -- until he draws the lost face of the skull and discovers it’s his own.

Lindsey (“The Rules of Silence”) riffs on the theme of faces -- what they hide and reveal, their relationship to identity and the soul -- with baroque enthusiasm. Vicente Mondragon, once a Mexican intelligence chief, now a CIA asset, had his whole face, except for the lips and eyeballs, peeled from his skull on Baida’s orders. Mondragon looks like a monster, and indeed he has become one. It’s he who approaches Bern, hinting at the importance of Teller’s mission -- Baida now plans to smuggle plutonium across the U.S.-Mexican border and kill 10,000 Americans -- and threatening Bern with blackmail to make sure he takes his brother’s place.

In another time, another novel, Bern might resist more strenuously. But in this one, he discovers he has some of Teller’s appetite for action and intrigue. Once in Mexico City, he shares an apartment with Teller’s attractive professional and romantic partner, Susana, and wears Teller’s clothes; Bern more or less becomes his brother.

The mission, which involves much quieting of Bern’s scruples, makes him a different, perhaps less interesting, protagonist than we expected, but it furthers the plot, which Lindsey unfolds with heightening suspense and a gift for describing violent death. His view of one of the world’s largest metropolises is menacingly atmospheric, like Richard Ford’s take on Oaxaca in “The Ultimate Good Luck.” The dialogue and spy craft of “The Face of the Assassin” have an authority to them that more than compensates for the formulaic surprises and double-crosses, the lies piled on lies that only the unusually gifted young Alice can penetrate.

Michael Harris is a regular contributor to Book Review.

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The Face of the Assassin

A Novel

David Lindsey

Warner: 402 pp., $25.95