Malice in Wonderland

By Michael Demarest

Atomic and genetic skulduggery is hijacked by amateurs

Fiction can anticipate fact. The cold war, espionage and terrorist novels of the past 20 years were often uncannily predictive; their plots now seem too true to be good. Technology is today's hot pistol, and it is in the hands of the amateur. It may be possible, for example, to heist Plutonium and fashion bombs to hold the world hostage. Private scientists might produce gene-altering chemicals. Almost any handyman can assemble a plastique weapon aimed at a Prime Minister or a whole city block. It is almost a natural consequence that in fiction, the old-line security bureaucracies, from CIA to KGB to M16, are being outrun by freelancers.

As in the classic English recipe beginning "First catch two dozen trout," the principal challenge to the do-it-yourself bombmaker is the snaring of radioactive material. In Z Warning, by Dan Oran and Lonn Hoklin (Ballantine; 336 pages; $8.95), the snatch-80 kilos of plutonium dioxide--is executed with lethal efficiency. The gang that pulls the job has its fusion in a Western mental hospital. There the principals--a deranged young Texas millionaire, a female Japanese physicist suffering from Nagasaki syndrome and a dishonorably discharged black Vietvet -first pool their malignant talents. The group's nuclear capability is channeled by an ambitious eminence blonde, mistress of a powerful and power-hungry U.S. Senator, in an attempt to plunge the nation into panic and bestow dictatorial powers on him/her.

Scientists pooh-pooh the notion that a ragtag team can transform PuO2 powder into bombs. But a senatorial aide, Kelly Gilliam, assisted by the Senator's daughter, puts two and E=mc^2 together and sets out to crack the conspiracy. The couple have to outwit the feds, who spend more time trying to defuse Kelly than the backyard armorers. In the end, on time, a mushroom cloud over Chesapeake Bay provides the adventure with a fissionable finale. Authors Oran and Hoklin, who have both served as congressional aides, do a Capitol job of describing the suites and sours of D.C. The atomic mechanics seem even more plausible: Dan Oran's wife is a nuclear physicist.

In Graham Lancaster's The Nuclear Letters (Atheneum; 233 pages; $8.95), a comparable quantity of hot material (plutonium-239) is lifted in 1972 from the Government's vast storage center in Washington State. Thereafter, a series of warnings descends on Western heads of state. Each communique threatens retaliation with four implosion devices if the respective addressees intervene in the affairs of states ranging from Uganda to Zaire. Where do the letters come from? What nation or individual has the bombs? In what cause?

As English Author Lancaster's smooth account unfolds, British and American intelligence trace a key intermediary to Cairo. An oleaginous wheeler-dealer named Schuyler Katz had masterminded the plutonium heist. Enter the amateur: Neil Janner, a handsome, high-living, tax-evasive Harley Street dentist. Why a dentist? Because the Londoner has regular appointments to service Katz's cavities in Cairo. Under heavy Anglo-American pressure, he agrees to go through the motions of removing a wisdom tooth from Katz after injecting his patient with sodium pentothal, the so-called truth drug. The extraction of molar and information is supervised by Helen Gull, a wickedly efficient CIA agent.

Next in line for the adroit dentist and his new partner-nurse is Ahmed al Hata, an albino Arab, pink-eyed and sickly white in a world of swarthy machismo. With surprising ease, Janner and Gull, lovers by now, manage a dental appointment with the reclusive master plotter. A beeper is implanted in his bridge work, and London intelligence soon learns that al Hata has planted the vaunted bombs somewhere in West Berlin.

That information also is the real plant, devised by the KGB. In fact, there are no bombs. The plutonium has never gone beyond a burial place in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The Soviets' scheme is to take over West Berlin without firing a shot. Warned in oozy amity by Moscow that it has learned of the impending devastation, the allied governments withdraw all civilians from the zone and start pulling out every last NATO soldier, leaving the city naked for the plucking. A credible, unnerving story that should make every reader leery of even the most innocent-looking New Hampshire hillside.

More worrisome to some than home-baked bombs is the work being done at biological warfare research stations. In The Empty House (Harper & Row; 245 pages; $9.95), a secretive genius named Alexander Wolfe has concluded that a chromosome-cracking solution dropped in a small nation's water supply could produce a generation of mindless freaks. No one knows how far Dr. Wolfe has gone in his research, or is likely to find out: his car was seen plunging off a cliff in southwestern England. Enter the amateur, in this case Insurance Investigator Peter Manciple, who knows Devonshire like the back of his hand: he attended public school there, and was dubbed "Mathematics" Manciple by one professor. Sleuth is soon convinced that scientist is on the lam.

So, too, are the British army, the Devonshire constabulary and rival nests of Israeli and Arab guerrillas intent on defanging Wolfe's research. They all converge on Manciple, who alone seems to have the clues. The highlight of the book is a chase scene across Exmoor that is as thrilling as John Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps. Michael Gilbert, a distinguished English lawyer (he wrote Ray mond Chandler's will) and prolific mystery author (19 novels to date), has never written with greater wit or ingenuity. He should bring back the new Math immediately.

The central figure of The Hadrian Ransom (Putnam; 275 pages; $9.95) wins this year's award for Most Unusual Kidnapee: Pope Hadrian IX. The holy heist in Allan Duane's psychological thriller has been planned by three disgruntled Americans and Rosella Asti, daughter of Italy's Ambassador to Washington. While the whole civilized world weeps and prays, the intricately plotted caper goes as smoothly as a sacrament--until the Red Brigades horn in on the action and the $4 million ransom money. The hero in the end is il Papa, a man of great energy, guile and charity. When it is not delivering adrenal suspense, Duane's book can double as a tourist's guide to offbeat Roma.

The Pope is a hard kidnap to follow. Hijacking the Kremlin is about the only plot outrageous enough--and that is precisely what a band of Russian dissidents sets out to do in David Lippincott's Salt Mine (Viking; 333 pages; $10.95). Led by the mysterious Alyosha Gregarin and funded by the World Jewish Alliance, amateurs of every faith and skill capture the Kremlin's Oruzheinaya Palata, taking hostage some 50 tourists and the sacred corpse of Lenin. Author Lippincott, who admits to having had "some intelligence connections," knows his Moscow and the schizoid style of its new aristocracy, the Politburocrats.

He also knows how to leaven suspense with satire. The book's grim five-day siege is softened throughout by memorable set-pieces. At one vodka-high point, captive Russian tourists and a bunch of Yale alumni swap song for song, while American wives instruct their captors in the Hustle. In another, bone-weary Alyosha beds a beautiful Intourist guide in Czarina Elizabeth I's Petersburg sled. Outside, in tune to the jouncing springs, a group of toasting Russians rhythmically applauds the lovers' vigor. For such flamboyant scenes and scenery, the saline Salt Mine deserves an ovation of its own.

The amateur in Victor Canning's Birdcage (Morrow; 233 pages; $8.95) is a young ex-copper handling his first major assignment for British intelligence. In fact, he is made to walk two sides of the street, London's Birdcage Walk, home of a covert security operation. Kerslake, as he is called-when treating of the lower classes, the English seldom assign first names--is sent to Portugal to investigate Sarah Branton, who is most definitely U. Sarah has spent eight years in a nunnery and has been saved from a suicidal drowning attempt by Richard Farley, a charming drifter of the sort that only the shires and Kenya can produce.

Kerslake, posing as a family solicitor, has a triple assignment: informing Sarah of her post-convent financial affairs, reporting on her current affaire with Farley and tracking down, on the privy instruction of the sinister Lord Bellmaster, any records that might be damaging to his ambitious lordship (he expects to be named Ambassador to Washington).

Kerslake does not find the evidence. But Farley stumbles on a diary: Lord Belly, it turns out, is Sarah's true father. Having impregnated the wanton Lady Jean, milord bribed an impecunious army officer to marry the gal. Lady Jean's memoir also records in damning detail Bellmaster's murders of two accomplices. Intelligence, fearful of security leakage, gives Kerslake a license to kill . . .

Canning, one of the very best of the English thriller writers, with 35 titles to his credit, combines suspense with ro mance, erudition and sardonic wit. He also reveals hard facts about some soft underBellies of Britain.

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