The Once and Future Spy Hardcover - 2003

by Robert Littell

By national bestselling author, Robert Littell, whose most recent novel, The Company, received rave reviews across the nation, The Once and Future Spy is finally back in print. This is Littell at the top of his form, constructing a tale of espionage and counterespionage that reveal the dirty tricks and dangerous secrets concerning the subjects he knows intimately-the CIA and American history, past and present. Littell proves beyond all doubt that he is a storyteller of inimitable caliber. As Stephen Coonts put it, "Eric Ambler invented the modern spy novel. Robert Littell perfected it. The Once and Future Spy is a classic spy story."

At the center of Littell's plot is an elite plan, so secret and so dangerous that its existence is known only to a tiny group of specialists within CIA headquarters. There is virtually no paper trail-but somehow, the plan has sprung a leak. The plotters must urgently trace it-or face deadly consequences. Meanwhile, at work elsewhere on another highly sensitive project for "the Company" is an operative known as "the Weeder"-a man obsessed with American history and one of its heroes. When the Weeder's and Washington's clandestine worlds collide, the present faces the past and disturbing moral choices are weighed against a shining patriotic dream. What is the truth? Whose truth should be believed?

Extraordinarily inventive, breathtakingly imaginative, and relentlessly gripping, The Once and Future Spy is easy to read, hard to put down.