THE HAZE

A weathered CIA agent takes on a new mission in this debut spy novel featuring multinational intrigue.

Hawkes’ intricate tale is set in 2013, when Hector Kane, a CIA operative masquerading as a college professor, is leading a class trip to Pulau, a fictional island nation in Southeast Asia. For the last three years, Kane has been a professor at the American Institute of Middle Eastern Studies in Cairo, where his father once taught. The institute has a history with the Pentagon, which uses it as a cover to plant soldiers and spies in the Middle East. Even the university trip to Pulau, ostensibly for academic purposes, is a sham—an excuse for Kane to get close to Fatima Noman, one of the students. Fatima is the dean’s niece—but more importantly, her father, Ibrahim Noman, holds tremendous political sway in Egypt. In 2011, his organization, Haram, was a platform for political activism, earning him the sobriquet “Godfather of the Revolution.” Now, Ibrahim runs Tamarod, a political venture to depose the Muslim Brotherhood and redo the last election. Kane’s mission is called Operation C.O.R.O.N.A., the purpose of which is “to abort the Egyptian anti-democratic movement known as Tamarod.” Fatima is a key piece of the plan: Kane, working with Pulau operatives, has been instructed to inject Fatima with KV-19, a coronavirus that causes severe respiratory symptoms. With Fatima infected, the CIA’s Cairo office will use her health as a bargaining chip to force Ibrahim to abort Tamarod. But it’s uncertain if this is the true mission, and Kane must wade through the waters of intrigue and a throng of geopolitical jostling to make sense of the situation. Like a good spy, he knows there’s no one to trust—least of all, his CIA handlers and associates.

Hawkes is a wonderfully vivid writer, using striking descriptions to illustrate character and place. “Her cheeks were stamped by butterfly freckles,” he writes of Fatima. The author’s passages about Pulau bring to life the island, with its “yacht-gorged harbor.” “Despite the tyranny of the haze,” Hawkes writes, “the city lived up to its reputation. Dazzling lights enlivening its streets and adorning its billion trees.” Given the author’s facility to make a story lively and urgent with clarity and details, the tale’s frequent digressions into the past become distracting, even frustrating. Hawkes is eager to establish Kane’s trajectory through the agency, rife with failures and frustrations. When Kane encounters a new character, the event often launches a backstory that tends to be too lengthy. With some characters, like Ibrahim, this backtracking is meant to lend the tale’s present the proper stakes. With others, it seems that Hawkes enjoys shading in the past even if it threatens the momentum of the fictional present. The novel’s swift and excellent prelude, for instance, shows what the author is capable of when his foot stays on the gas. Still, the story is enjoyably twisty, full of duplicity and deception, and portrays complicated characters who have competing allegiances and motives. The book also deftly depicts the frighteningly labyrinthine bureaucracy of the intelligence community.

A knotty and satisfying tale of action, drama, and secrets.