Legends

Littell Robert Littell

Description

Robert Littell is the undisputed master of American spy fiction, hailed for his profound grasp of the world of international espionage. His previous novel, The Company, an international bestseller, was praised as "one of the best spy novels ever written" (Chicago Tribune). For his new novel, Legends, Littell focuses on the life of one great agent caught in a "wilderness of mirrors" where both remembering and forgetting his past are deadly options. Martin Odum is a CIA field agent turned private detective, struggling his way through a labyrinth of past identities - "legends" in CIA parlance. Is he really Martin Odum? Or is he Dante Pippen, an IRA explosives maven? Or Lincoln Dittmann, Civil War expert? These men like different foods, speak different languages, have different skills. Is he suffering from multiple personality disorder, brainwashing, or simply exhaustion? Can Odum trust the CIA psychiatrist? Or Stella Kastner, a young Russian woman who engages him to find her brother-in-law so he can give her sister a divorce. As Odum redeploys his dormant tradecraft skills to solve Stella's case, he travels the globe battling mortal danger and psychological disorientation. Part Three Faces of Eve, part The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and always pure Robert Littell, Legends-from unforgettable opening to astonishing ending-again proves Littell's unparalleled prowess as a seductive storyteller.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781590208328
• Langue: English

Extrait

Also by Robert Littell
FICTION
THE COMPANY
WALKING BACK THE CAT
THE VISITING PROFESSOR
AN AGENT IN PLACE
THE ONCE AND FUTURE SPY
THE REVOLUTIONIST
THE SISTERS
THE AMATEUR
THE DEBRIEFING
MOTHER RUSSIA
THE OCTOBER CIRCLE
SWEET REASON
THE DEFECTION OF A.J. LEWINTER
NON-FICTION
FOR THE FUTURE OF ISRAEL
(with Shimon Peres)
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental the same is true for events.
First published in the United States in 2005 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
Woodstock New York
W OODSTOCK :
One Overlook Drive
Woodstock, NY 12498
www.overlookpress.com
[for individual orders, bulk and special sales, contact our Woodstock office]
N EW Y ORK :
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright 2005 by Robert Littell
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-59020-832-8
For my muses:
Marie-Dominique and Victoria
All names are pseudonyms.
-R OMAIN G ARY (writing under the pen name Emile Ajar)

.one of those individuals with multiple faces-like so many of the great spies of Cold War mythology-who invariably turn out to be different from who they seem and, when we think we have located them at the center of a great riddle, show up as part of another, even greater riddle
-B ERNARD -H ENRI L VY , Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
Contents
Also by Robert Littell
Copyright
1993: THE CONDEMNED MAN CATCHES A GLIMPSE OF THE ELEPHANT
1997: MARTIN ODUM HAS A CHANGE OF HEART
1994: MARTIN ODUM GETS ON WITH HIS LIVES
1997: MARTIN ODUM DISCOVERS THAT NOT MUCH IS SACRED
1997: MINH SLEEPWALKS THROUGH ONE-NIGHT STANDS
1997: OSKAR ALEXANDROVICH KASTNER DISCOVERS THE WEIGHT OF A CIGARETTE
1987: DANTE PIPPEN BECOMES AN IRA BOMBER
1989: DANTE PIPPEN SEES THE MILKY WAY IN A NEW LIGHT
1997: MARTIN ODUM DISCOVERS THAT SHAMUS IS A YIDDISH WORD
1997: MARTIN ODUM MEETS A BORN-AGAIN OPPORTUNIST
1997: MARTIN ODUM PLAYS INNOCENT
1994: THE ONLY FODDER WAS CANNON FODDER
1990: LINCOLN DITTMANN TAKES ON A LIFE OF HIS OWN
1991: LINCOLN DITTMANN WORKS THE ANGLES OF THE TRIANGLE
1997: MARTIN ODUM IS MESMERIZED TO TEARS
1997: MARTIN ODUM IS ACCUSED OF HIGH AND LOW TREASON
1997: MARTIN ODUM REACHES NO-WOMAN S LAND
1994: LINCOLN DITTMANN SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT
1994: BERNICE TREFFLER LOSES A PATIENT
1997: MARTIN ODUM DISCOVERS THE KATOVSKY GAMBIT
1992: HOW LINCOLN DITTMANN CAME TO GO TO LANGUAGE SCHOOL
1997: MARTIN ODUM GETS TO INSPECT THE SIBERIAN NIGHT MOTH
1997: MARTIN ODUM GETS THE GET
1997: LINCOLN DITTMANN CONNECTS THE DOTS
1997: LINCOLN DITTMANN FEELS THE RECOIL IN HIS SHOULDER BLADES
1997: CRYSTAL QUEST COMES TO BELIEVE IN DANTE S TRINITY
1993: THE CONDEMNED MAN CATCHES A GLIMPSE OF THE ELEPHANT
T HEY HAD FINALLY GOTTEN AROUND TO PAVING THE SEVEN kilometers of dirt spur connecting the village of Prigorodnaia to the four-lane Moscow-Petersburg highway. The local priest, surfacing from a week-long binge, lit beeswax tapers to Innocent of Irkutsk, the saint who in the 1720s had repaired the road to China and was now about to bring civilization to Prigorodnaia in the form of a ribbon of macadam with a freshly painted white stripe down the middle. The peasants, who had a shrewder idea of how Mother Russia functioned, thought it more likely that this evidence of progress, if that was the correct name for it, was somehow related to the purchase, several months earlier, of the late and little lamented Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria s sprawling wooden dacha by a man identified only as the Oligarkh . Next to nothing was known about him. He came and went at odd hours in a glistening black Mercedes S-600 sedan, his shock of silver hair and dark glasses a fleeting apparition behind its tinted windows. A local woman hired to do laundry was said to have seen him angrily flick cigar ashes from the crow s-nest rising like a turret from the dacha before turning back to issue instructions to someone. The woman, who was terrified of the dacha s newfangled electric washing machine and scrubbed the laundry in a shallow reach of the river, had been too far away to make out more than a few words- Buried, that s what I want, but alive -but they and the Oligarkh s feral tone had dispatched a chill down her spine that made her shudder every time she recounted the story. Two peasants cutting firewood on the other side of the river had caught a glimpse of the Oligarkh from a distance, struggling on aluminum crutches along the path behind his dacha that led to the dilapidated paper factory disgorging dirty white smoke from its giant stacks fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and beyond that to the village cemetery and the small Orthodox church with the faded paint peeling away from its onion domes. A pair of Borzois rollicked in the dirt ahead of the Oligarkh as he thrust one hip forward and dragged the leg after it, then repeated the movement with the other hip. Three men in Ralph Lauren jeans and telnyashki , the distinctive striped shirts that paratroopers often continued to wear after they quit the army, trailed after him, shotguns cradled in the crooks of their arms. The peasants had been sorely tempted to try for a closer look at the stubby, hunch-shouldered newcomer to their village, but abandoned the idea when one of them reminded the other what the Metropolitan come from Moscow to celebrate Orthodox Christmas two Januaries earlier had proclaimed from the ambo:
If you are stupid enough to dine with the devil, for Christ s sake use a long spoon .
The road crew, along with giant tank-treaded graders and steam-rollers and trucks brimming with asphalt and crushed stone, had turned up during the night while the aurora borealis was still flickering like soundless cannon fire in the north; it didn t take much imagination to suppose a great war was being fought beyond the horizon. Casting elongated shadows in the ghostly gleam of headlights, the men pulled on tar-stiff overalls and knee-high rubber boots and set to work. By first light, with forty meters of paved road behind them, the aurora and the stars had vanished, but two planets were visible in the moonless sky: one, Mars, directly overhead, the other, Jupiter, still dancing in the west above the low haze saturated with the amber glow of Moscow. When the lead crew reached the circular crater that had been gouged in the dirt spur the day before by a steam shovel, the foreman blew on a whistle. The machines ground to a halt.
Why are we stopping? one of the drivers, leaning out the cab of his steamroller, shouted impatiently through the face mask he d improvised to filter out the sulfurous stench from the paper factory. The men, who were paid by the meter and not the hour, were anxious to keep moving forward.
At any moment we are expecting Jesus to return to earth as a Russian czar, the foreman called back lazily. We don t want to miss it when he comes across the river. He lit a thick Turkish cigarette from the embers of an old one and strolled down to the edge of the river that ran parallel to the road for several kilometers. It was called the Lesnia, which was the name of the dense woods it meandered through as it skirted Prigorodnaia. At 6:12 a cold sun edged above the trees and began to burn off the mustard-thick September haze that clung to the river, which was in flood, creating a margin of shallow marshes on either side; long blades of grass could be seen undulating in the current.
The fisherman s dinghy that materialized out of the haze couldn t make it as far as the shore and the three occupants were obliged to climb out and wade the rest of the way. The two men wearing paratrooper shirts pulled off their boots and socks and rolled their jeans up to their knees. The third occupant didn t have to. He was stark naked. A crown of thorns, with blood trickling where the skin had been torn, sat on his head. A large safety pin attached to a fragment of cardboard had been passed through the flesh between his shoulder blades; on the cardboard was printed: The spy Kafkor. The prisoner, his wrists and elbows bound behind him with a length of electrical wire, had several weeks growth of matted beard on his face, and purple bruises and what looked like cigarette burns over his emaciated body. Stepping cautiously through the slime until he reached solid ground, looking disoriented, he regarded his image in the shallow water of the river while the paratroopers dried their feet with an old shirt, then pulled on their socks and boots and rolled down their pants.
The spy Kafkor didn t appear to recognize the figure gaping at him from the surface of the river.
By now the two dozen crewmen, mesmerized by the arrival of the three figures, had abandoned all interest in road work. Drivers swung out of their cabs, the men with rakes or shovels stood around shifting their weight from one foot to the other in discomfort. No one doubted that something dreadful was about to happen to the naked Christ, who was being prodded up the incline by the paratroopers. Nor did they doubt that they were meant to witness it and spread the story. Such things happened all the time in Russia these days.
Back on the stretch of freshly paved road, the team s ironmonger wiped his sweaty palms on his thick leather apron, then retrieved a lunch box from the bullock-cart piled with welding gear and scrambled up the slope to get a better view of the proceedings. The ironmonger, who was short and husky and wearing tinted steel-rimmed eyeglasses, flicked open the lid of