The Nearest Exit

  

My pal Stephanie gave me a couple of Olen Steinhauer’s, in paperback, curious to know what I thought.  I was a big fan of Berlin Station, so I knew of the guy, although I hadn’t read any of his books.  (Berlin Station, if you’re not familiar with it, was a spy show Steinhauer wrote and exec produced, shot on location, solid cast, tight scripts.  I thought it was convincing and adroit, but I have to say the first season was the best.)  In the event, there are four novels so far in the Milo Weaver series, about a CIA agent trying to retire from the game, and I’ve now read the first two, The Tourist and The Nearest Exit. 

I wasn’t crazy about The Tourist.  It was a little too Red Sparrow, if that makes any sense – overwrought in the wrong places, meaning both books went deep into the mechanics of stuff I didn’t care about, at the expense of clarity and momentum.  That’s probably an unkind criticism.  The Tourist has a terrific third act, no question, but it took a while getting there.  Having now read The Nearest Exit, I have the unsettled feeling that The Tourist is a necessary prequel, but in the sense of being like an author’s note to himself.  Again, that seems like a mean-spirited thing to say.  It’s as if there were too much clutter, competing for his attention, and he had to get it out of the way before he could write the far more crisp and sinister second book.  Anyway, least said, soonest mended. 

It’s probably obvious, by this point, that I thought The Nearest Exit was terrific.  It’s about a deception op, meant to make the clandestine CIA department, the Tourists, doubt their security.  This is one of the elements that bothered me in the previous book, that CIA would set up an off-the-books entity like the Bureau of Tourism, which doesn’t answer to chain of command.  It’s simply not how a national intelligence apparat operates.  You might very well want to cultivate deniability, and use black money to establish a proprietary, so you’re one step removed, but even if you’re using a system of cut-outs, to protect yourself from direct responsibility, you’ll never surrender command authority.  Reading the second Milo book, though, my required suspension of disbelief was frictionless.  What gave me pause earlier didn’t seem important, this time.

While we’re talking about the rogue or ‘disavowed’ black ops unit, a staple of conspiracy thrillers, we might pause to consider its real-life origins.  CIA has been troubled from the beginning by the institutional split between intelligence-gathering and covert operations, sometimes known by the euphemism Active Measures, or what’s called spook shit in the trade.  The wartime OSS and SOE (the Brit asymmetric warfare outfit) did a lot of behind-the-lines sabotage, and used information management and disruption to good effect.  Some of the schemes they came up with were Looney Tunes – some of the schemes they successfully executed were Looney Tunes, see The Man Who Never Was – but they didn’t lack for imagination and daring.  Allen Dulles was the OSS resident in Bern during the war, and when he took over CIA, in 1953, he brought with him a fatal weakness for the romance of covert.  It’s just so tempting.  CIA rarely gets in trouble for intelligence collection, it’s always some cowboy crap.  Dulles oversaw painless coup d’etats in Iran and Guatemala, and then tripped over his skirts at Bay of Pigs.  This didn’t mean people gave up on covert, they just thought, We’ll manage it better next time around, and then they blew their cover, yet again. 

This is precisely the threat environment in the Milo Weaver novels, a secret spook shop, not much loved and certainly never acknowledged, always in danger of being exposed.  They operate on the periphery, and seem to specialize in Wet Work, eliminating the awkward or embarrassing loose end, the compromised asset, the defector in place that’s lost their nerve or outlived their usefulness.  There are two parallel plot lines in The Nearest Exit, the hunt for a double agent, inside Tourism, and the sex traffic in children, from Eastern Europe.  And like parallel lines, receding into the distance, they appear to converge as they approach the horizon, but that could be an illusion.

Here’s the thing I really liked about Exit.  The second act goes off in a completely different direction, with a completely different set of characters, and circles back with a very deliberate and almost fated sense of mixed motives and missed signals.  The theme is retribution, and it gets claustrophobically personal.  All very John le Carré, in its circularity, and a le Carré turn of phrase comes to mind, shaking the tree.  It’s both satisfying and astringent, the moral complications never theatrical, but a steady bass rhythm, in support of the flashier solos.

Highly recommended.  This is what good spy fiction looks like, when you don’t condescend to the material, and let it find its own voice, open to sorrow and ambiguities.