The Coldest Warrior, by Paul Vidich

A carefully constructed story that offers a fresh take on the lives of spies, a bit reminiscent of le Carre’s, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

One wants to believe that an espionage agent has a conscience, because it is well known that spy agencies do bad things, acts that are morally inconsistent with Western values. And that is exactly what The Coldest Warrior is about, a man, Jack Gabriel, who cannot retire without first uncovering the malfeasance of his employer, the CIA, two decades before, killing one of their own, Charles Wilson, who had developed a conscience while deploying germ warfare in North Korea. And so conscience abounds in the novel, or the lack of it. Murder is permitted in the CIA’s situational ethics if it is necessary to protect the agency, and the book’s plot is full of murders. Of course, one murderer finally gets his due at the end, but the agency’s secrets remain secret. They always do, which is why the agency has not been “defunded.” And there is the conundrum. Is the agency’s purpose so necessary to our national security that its inevitable associated misconduct should be kept out of sight? The reader must answer that question, although the outcome of Vidich’s story nudges one to a positive response.

The protagonist of Vidich’s earlier novels, George Mueller, was a complex character, struggling with moral uncertainty and psychological perils that one finds in Graham Greene’s characters. Jack Gabriel unfortunately isn’t as fine a character as Mueller. On occasion his internal observations are stiff, almost formulaic. His relationship with his daughter and his wife demonstrate that he is a thoughtful man, but one doesn’t see much below the superficial. Jack Gabriel’s thoughts and actions are all there, and the reader is pointed in his character’s direction, but much of the color is not filled in. Wilson’s murder is presented to the reader in the first pages. No mystery there. Then, the plot has wonderful twists and turns, and the unravelling of the motives and justifications for the murder is expertly presented. One cannot really guess what is going to happen before it does, and the final action in the story is thrilling to read. This is the stuff of a literary spy novel, not a commercialized who dunnit good-guy-prevails story.

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