ACROBAT

It’s not George Smiley’s kind of spycraft, but it’s complex enough and no less deadly.

Swaggering body language, hip and swingy language—color them infinitely gaudier than the usual Smiley-gray: in fact, think of the Mod Squad folded into the CIA, and perhaps a picture will start to emerge. Five youngsters—in their 20s—have been organized into a counterintelligence work group called ACROBAT for a mission that’s difficult, dangerous—and compromised almost before it gets underway. We first meet them the day after disaster is established as a condition of their lives, the day after they find themselves shunted out into the cold in a manner so brutally unexpected as to be downright Kafka-like. After a series of brilliant successes, ACROBAT has suddenly, inexplicably become anathema, the object of an all-out hunt masterminded by the redoubtable Nicholas Denton. Among the most powerful of CIA bureaucrats, Denton, as elegant as he is unprincipled, is intent on the fall of ACROBAT’s high-fliers. Why? What could have gone wrong? As in all good spy stories, the reasons are murky, calculatedly inaccessible. Has ACROBAT learned things about Denton that threaten the bubble reputation? Does Denton know things about ACROBAT—and its éminence grise Tom Carr—that discredit its very reason for being? Whichever the case, it’s clear that Denton and Carr share an aversion transcending the facts of the matter. As the ACROBAT kids twist and turn to elude the relentless Denton, they reveal themselves as a much more disparate group than they seemed at the outset, though what they have in common are courage, resourcefulness, and feelings of intense loyalty to each other. It’s their differences, however, that make them so interesting. And their fates so poignant.

Lira (Counterparts, 1998) is an edgy, energetic storyteller, and his spin on a well-worn genre has it frisking about almost as if newly minted.