THE BERLIN ENDING

Even without the prefatory E., the team player is none other than...as well as the man who has written other CIA entertainments which earned him $20,000 a year in smaller change before he went into those dirty tricks and projects. The game plan here is pretty simple -- agent Neal Thorpe assumes custody of a girl he's first escorted into Washington who turns out to be the stepdaughter of the German Foreign Minister who may be the next Secretary General of the U.N. but actually is a Soviet spy. Pure and innocent coincidence. Russians pop up in every comer imaginable and as nearly as we can remember they include a rich Jew and a Cardinal tagged as a French Prince of the Church. The publishers expect this to be anything but inoperative (even if it's not very good). At this point in time they're probably right.