FREEDOM TO KILL

Detroit's own FBI cowboy Mike Devlin, who never walks away from a loaded gun, is banished to D.C. to shuffle records and get his blood pressure down—only to find himself staring down a monomaniacal terrorist. The assignment Devlin backs into is to identify the Freedom Killer, a man who starts the ball rolling by taking a doped-up Disease Control technician and two vials of African Lassa virus for an outing at Disney World. Pretty scary stuff—but the Freedom Killer is only warming up, as his grandiose, threatening letters make clear. This ``cataclysmist'' is so consumed with resentment against the US government that he's willing to do anything—adulterate drugs, plant bombs, assassinate public figures—in order to create the kind of mass hysteria that will shut the whole country down. Browbeating Tony Bonelli, an FBI records clerk with multiple sclerosis and a chip on his shoulder, into helping him, Devlin goes up against the Freedom Killer armed only with a psychological profile, the Bureau's formidable database, and the hope that he'll be able to narrow the list of suspects from a quarter of a billion to one. It's a familiar story—the lunatic loner (``Take a moment to look around and witness freedom's last dance'') versus the machinery of the heroic bureaucracy—and this time, Lindsay, who turned Devlin's hair-trigger individuality to such stunning account in Witness to the Truth (1992) and Gentkill (1995), seems stifled by the side he's chosen; the only acting-out Devlin gets to do, apart from the repeated obligatory brandishing of loaded weapons, is dueling with an I'm-so-tough bartender for a description of the killer, and facing down his loyal wife Knox (an obvious Anne Archer role), who just doesn't think she can take his heroics any more. Expert but synthetic, then, with a much better part for the brilliant, wigged-out Freedom Killer (who doesn't half live up to his billing) than for our hero.