EXTRAORDINARY POWERS

Soviet spy maven Finder (The Moscow Club, 1991) adapts to the disappearance of the Red Menace—without missing a step—by following the trail of $10 billion spirited out of Russia to protect it from hard-liners: a fortune in gold that's rearranging a lot of loyalties from Moscow to Washington. The hunt for the money begins when Ben Ellison—a former CIA loose cannon who's taken refuge in patent law from his bloody past (his wife Laura was killed and his boss Toby Thompson paralyzed when an East German defection went horribly wrong) and from his hotheaded nature—is pressed by CIA-director-designate Alexander Truslow to go after Vladimir Orlov, the KGB chief who arranged the transfer of the gold. The transfer was done with the help of Harrison Sinclair— Truslow's predecessor at the Agency and the late father of Ben's second wife Molly—in return for a KGB file dishing the dirt on CIA higher-ups. When Ben turns Truslow down, a CIA investigation of his broker freezes his assets—and then, when Ben grudgingly agrees to cooperate, Truslow arranges a lie-detector screening that's actually a cover for giving Ben a jolt of the extrasensory, mind-reading powers Truslow thinks he'll need to track down Orlov and the money. What Ben's extraordinary powers tell him along the way, of course, is that his CIA masters aren't just interested in returning the gold to Mother Russia: the folks Orlov's file was fingering want to cover themselves and their grasp on the missing bullion by using Ben as a cat's paw and assassinating a mysterious witness before he can blow their covert operation sky-high in Congressional testimony. Can indestructible Ben, staggering from a brace of revelations about the deaths of Laura and Sinclair, identify the witness in time to stop the assassination—or will he be killed himself, as a prefatory note darkly hints? The complex story purrs along like a high-powered race car loaded with options, even though it all boils down to Telepathic Man and a bunch of lesser guys with guns after the big score. (First printing of 100,000)