Old Boys
Charles McCarry
Language: English
Pages: 476
ISBN: 0143035495
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In his magnificent new novel, Charles McCarry returns to the world of his legendary character, Paul Christopher, the crack intelligence agent who is as skilled at choosing a fine wine as he is at tradecraft, at once elegant and dangerous, sophisticated and rough-and-ready. As the novel begins, Paul Christopher, now an aging but remarkably fit 70ish, is dining at home with his cousin Horace, also an ex-agent. Dinner is delicious and uneventful. A day later, Paul has vanished. The months pass, Paulís ashes are delivered by a Chinese official to the American consulate in Beijing and a memorial service is held in Washington. But Horace is not convinced that Paul is dead and, enlisting the support of six other retired colleagues—a sort of all-star backfield of the old Outfit—Horace gets the "Old Boys" back in the game to find Paul Christopher.
They start with a photo found in Paulís study: a womanís hand holding a centuriesí old scroll, once in the possession of the Nazis and now sought by the U.S. government and Muslim extremists alike. Harassed by American intelligence, hunted by terrorists, Horace Christopher and the Old Boys travel the globe, from Xinjiang to Brazil, from Rome to Tel Aviv, Budapest to Moscow, in search of Paul and the unspeakably dangerous truth.
maidenhead experience for me. He represented my first try at turning an American against his own government, but I didn’t see why that should be any more difficult than suborning a Chinese or an Arab. The principle was the same—make him believe that I was asking him to do something for his country. In this case, that happened to be true. The other magic ingredient, gratification, was also present. I knew what he wanted to do and I had it in my power to make it possible for him to do it. I said,
people who are with him. But you will have to find them before you can question them, and if you find them you will have found him.” “And if I don’t find them?” “Then you must do what one does when lost in the desert,” Kalash replied. “Go back to where you started and begin again. Do you have pen and paper?” I handed over my Bic and a page from my notebook. Kalash scribbled a man’s name and the name of a place, Manaus, on the paper. “You should go talk to this man,” he said. “He knows
date of his visit, less than a week after his disappearance, was written in neat Germanic script in the white space at the bottom of the picture. Hawk said, “You know him?” I handed back the picture. “Yes.” “You are in pursuit of him?” “In a sense. He’s my cousin. The family is concerned about him.” “So the first person whom you asked for assistance was Kalash al Khatar.” “Yes.” “Why?” “He also sent my cousin here.” “And your name is actually Horace Hubbard, not Dyer?” “Kalash has been
Moscow, twenty years before, her heart was barely beating. Now it seemed to be fibrillating. We were confronted everywhere by wonders. Restaurant food was edible, waiters smiled for tips. Bare skin and German cars were much in evidence, money was a more popular topic of conversation than the weather, the jokes were about sex instead of the Politburo. Darkness still fell at four o’clock in December. At four-thirty on our first day in town, Harley Waters pulled me out of my hotel room into a
professional skills and hidden confederates and expensive props that Judas could not possibly organize without ripping gaping holes in his cover. Although the Scroll estimates the crowd at around 500, rather than the 5,000 mentioned in John 1:10, the enterprise was a huge success. Joshua, however, walked away from the feast while it was still in progress, leaving the disciples behind, and disappeared into the hills alone (John 6:15). Judas reported this as Joshua’s disgusted reaction to the