"Nam. Nam. Nam. Nam. Nam. Nam." The single syllable ricochets like a stray sharp rock through Alex Berenson's Faithful Spy, connecting fighters and bureaucrats, revolutionaries and black-marketeers, the peaceful and the violent. Though much of the action is conducted by misguided Americans in a hopelessly escalating war, we aren't in Indochina anymore. The word means yes in Arabic, and there is global terror afoot in the novel, with precious few equipped to keep annihilation from our own shores.
The kind of spy thriller Berenson has set out to deliver has to contend nowadays with a world's worth of violent events flashing from battlefield and bomb site to television or computer screen at the blink of a satellite signal. Where does that leave the war novel? The fiction of international intrigue?
For Berenson, a reporter who covered Iraq for three months in 2003, it goes beyond ripping his story from the headlines to imagining, and in some instances eerily predicting, scenarios tied to his central premise: that a Central Intelligence Agency operative infiltrated al-Qaida several years before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York. John Wells, his man undercover, is making it his mission to help lasso the storm of catastrophe, madness, secrets and betrayal that continue in its aftermath.
Lest this seem a prescription for more derring-do than reflection, Berenson gives himself plenty of opportunity to ruminate -- on politics, poverty, Islam, trust, courage and festering bureaucratic rivalries -- by cramming his book full of people who think, plot and (sometimes too conveniently) experience the emotions he needs to move his story along. They appear and disappear in great numbers, ready-made for the movie for which The Faithful Spy has already been optioned.
But there is a sadness to the swiftness with which he draws his portraits of players caught here, there and everywhere in a global web of interdependent blame. He brings characters to life to have them killed, maimed, left for worse than dead. A business reporter, Berenson has run the numbers on the current state of world affairs, and the results do not look good.
Wells has dedicated his recent career to trying to get those numbers to add up to an understanding of Osama bin Laden's terror network so the CIA and company can destroy it. In his guise of Muslim convert and American turncoat, he has even met the elusive leader "with cunning narrow eyes." Despite Wells' infinite training, fearless intelligence and the lethal instincts of the Montana high school football champ he once was, he has failed to assassinate "the Sheikh."
More than that, he has spent years having to convince one skeptical Qaida comrade after the next that he is for real, braving the cold, the privations and the prejudices of tribal existence in Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier. He has sacrificed his family back home -- a wife and a young child, his aging, beloved parents -- to the cause.
Berenson gives Wells -- or Jalal, as he's known in his jihadi incarnation -- a Muslim Lebanese grandmother to make his increasing belief in Islam credible, and a pretty CIA handler, Jennifer Exley, who has also forfeited everything for an ungrateful agency, to doubt and love him simultaneously. When Wells gets wind of a plot against the US far graver than the World Trade Center attacks, he has to expedite his return to the US to avert it. He comes down from his alien mountains and into post-Sept. 11 American culture like Rip van Winkle in a turban.
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