THE APOCALYPSE WATCH

The return of the neo-Nazis, known here as the Brotherhood of the Watch, signals the rise of the Fourth Reich, a group once again bent on world domination. Ludlum's recent successful heart operation, hailed at length in the novel's dedication, seems to have lowered the hysteria of his plotting, dulled his sweet tooth for italics, and curbed his urge to seed pages with !!! points—all adding marginally to his focus as he packs paragraphs with amazing funds of knowledge and technical wiring. His storytelling, meanwhile, still evolves like mitosis, each detail splitting into two new details until a page is threaded with facts beyond all human recall. The story: After 32 months of grueling serpentine work, Harry Latham (code-named Sting), multilingual deep-cover agent for American intelligence, penetrates the secret lair of the Brotherhood of the Watch, its huge, fully operational training camp camouflaged in an Alpine valley. The neo-Nazis, though, know who Harry is and subject him to a computer-chip brain implant loaded with false detail, then wipe out his recent memory with hypnosis and free him to return to CIA headquarters, where he'll download disinformation implicating neo-Nazi enemies as secret neo-Nazi friendlies, making them objects of a witch hunt. The implant, however, causes fatal hemorrhages. Once Harry's debriefed, even his brother Drew Latham, Special Officer for Consular Operations in Paris, can't believe that all of the enemies Harry lists are real, though Drew himself survives endless neo-Nazi assassination tries and the splatter of Harry's brains before going after the Brotherhood with a vengeance that leaps from Washington to London and Monaco and ends in Brotherhood's Loire Valley lair. Assassins dance forward at a nudge from the mouse on Ludlum's keyboard—but it's all fun, death left and right, Harry's head blown apart, the chests of Nazi guards bursting from Drew's auto-repeat silencer, all bloody great fun—and relatively mature Ludlum.