The Cassandra Compact - a Covert-One novel

Ludlum, Robert & Philip Shelby

ISBN 10: 0312981589 / ISBN 13: 9780312981587

Published by St. Martins Paperbacks Mar 2002, New York, 2002

About this Item

Covert-one operatives battle a global conspiracy. Bright tight clean copy of PB 1st. 442 pp, a/w author photos.

Seller Inventory # 37679

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Cassandra Compact - a Covert-One novel
• Publisher: St. Martins Paperbacks Mar 2002, New York
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312981589
• ISBN 13: 9780312981587
• Binding: MM paperback in black wraps.
• Edition: 1st PB printing.
• Condition: Fine unmarked
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction, Poetry, Literature, Criticism

About this title

Synopsis

The murder of a Russian colleague sends Lt. Colonel Jon Smith, a medical researcher, and his colleagues at Covert-One on the quest to find the terrorists threatening to steal Russia's remaining store of deadly smallpox virus before they can unleash an epidemic on the world's population. Reprint.

Review

In Robert Ludlum's The Cassandra Compact, Covert-One, the president's personal, super-secret agency formed after some recent virus-driven chaos (The Hades Factor, co-written with Gayle Lynds), is staffed by an unknown number of international covert operatives, including Dr Jon Smith, late of the USAMRIID. And a good thing, too, because someone's helped themselves to Russia's share of the world's last two stores of the smallpox virus, an eradicated yet hideously deadly bug with no ready vaccine.

That the pox was nabbed and who nabbed it is clear enough early on. Why such a seemingly large and disparate cadre of global citizens (keeping the players straight puts one in mind of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine) chose to pinch the bug and for what end are the novel's driving questions. Freelance Serbian uber-nasty, Ivan Beria, is among the apparent perpetrators as are Dylan Reed and Adam Treloar of NASA, Tony Price, the head of the super-secret NSA and a bunch of Russians. The good-guys roster claims Smith, Covert-One's head Nathaniel Klein, Briton and ex-SAS man Peter Howell, Smith's deceased girlfriend's sister and CIA operative Randi Russell, the girlfriend's best friend, backup shuttle astronaut Megan Olson and another bunch of Russians. Suffice it to say that Smith and company trot the globe, cat-and-mousing after the pox and in so doing careen through a classically speedy and Ludlumesque (if coincidence dependent) plot leaving large numbers of efficiently dispatched corpses in their wake. --Michael Hudson