Russia is in turmoil. As liberals struggle to hold power, the hard-liners in the KGB decide tof fund themselves. They will hijack a vital US gold shipment. The first step will be to frame Kirk McGarvey for the bombing of the CIA's Paris headquarters... From Publishers WeeklyThe Paris CIA station is bombed just as the U.S. returns long-frozen bank assets to Iran--in the form of 125 tons of gold. A coincidence? Not when the evidence points to ex-CIA agent Kirk McGarvey. Not when a KGB starved for funds under Gorbachev calculates the uses it could make of the treasure. And not when top KGB killer Arkady Kurshin is ready to betray his own service in order to see McGarvey dead. Hagberg recycles the central characters from Countdown in a contemporary secret-agent thriller, with settings that range from Buenos Aires to Teheran. The novel's dizzying pace is sustained at some sacrifice of clarity and credibility: a secondary plot taking McGarvey and German/Argentinean beauty Maria Schimmer in pursuit of a hoard of Nazi gold is poorly integrated with a main story line that has the Russians changing policies in an unnecessarily random fashion. But Hagberg is a master of the action scene, and readers will cheerfully follow him from episode to episode, eager to see how he extracts his characters from a succession of apparently hopeless predicaments. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus ReviewsRussians, Iranians, Americans, Nazis, Israelis, and Argentines go for each others' throats in the search for real, fake, old, and new gold in at least two hemispheres. Hagberg (Countdown, Cross Fire) also writes as Sean Flannery (Counterstrike, Crossed Swords). The mystery guest enters the American Embassy in Paris and signs in as Kirk McGarvey. He conducts a bit of fake business about a lapsed passport and then wanders off on his own to plant enough plastic explosive to demolish the building and then slips outside to push the button. The real Kirk McGarvey, an out-of- favor CIA assassin, recognizes the professional signature of Arkady Kurshin, the Russian superagent that McGarvey himself had shot and thrown overboard in the middle of the Mediterranean. Could Kurshin have survived? And is he carrying out a personal vendetta? He could and he is. McGarvey, who hadn't been doing much of anything, suddenly has his hands full searching for Kurshin--whose Paris job is just the first in a series planned for all the major European capitals--and also searching with a very tense, very sexy brunette for a missing Nazi submarine, last seen off Argentina. The U-boat's captain was the brunette's father, and there was a very valuable cargo--possibly a load of ill-gotten gold the size of a shipment from the US to Iran that McGarvey must keep from disappearing into the Soviet Disunion. Sounds terribly confusing, but it's not. After 18 journeyman thrillers, Hagberg knows what he's doing. McGarvey wears very well indeed. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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