The anxiety for Exley and her suspicious, bungling colleagues in the so-called intelligence community is that Wells has become their Kurtz, that he has "gone over" all the way into a heart of darkness. Wells seems not always to know his loyalties for sure, either. It doesn't help that, in their drive to destroy the Western modernity they have tasted but cannot afford to provide to their swelling populations, the ruthless masterminds he tries to thwart make up in smarts for what they lack in scruples.
When it's not fatal, Berenson sees the darkly comic in such cross-pollinations of hostile civilizations. "Jihadis couldn't resist machine pistols," Wells observes, "they had seen too many action movies." But the action can shift equally to Iraq, and to skittish American soldiers at large in a hopelessly impoverished land, with no resolution in sight.
Simply, everything and everyone have changed. Wells "regretted not having been a spy during the Cold War," Berenson writes at one point. "Back then the game had possessed a certain formal elegance. Neither side really expected the other to blow up the world, and proxy soldiers in Africa and Central America fought the nastiest battles."
Now his Americans step over every conceivable line drawn by the Constitution in scenes of torture and coercion, while their enemies delight in doing the innocent harm. A new language is spoken, couched in hypotheticals and unfamiliar signs, and a new math has had to be devised to calculate the outcome of hijackings, biological assaults and technological cruelty in the service of fundamentalist religion.
If Berenson remains as much reporter as novelist at this point -- a newspaper editor would tell him he had overstuffed his lead, and that he often tended to impart information that was all too well known -- he still has an ingenious narrative to show for it. Uncertain times call for tough examinations, and The Faithful Spy doesn't back away.
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