Littell, Robert

New York. 1981. May 1981. Simon & Schuster. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. Remainder Mark On Bottom Edge. 0671418734. 252 pages. hardcover. Cover: One Plus One Studio. keywords: Mystery America Espionage. FROM THE PUBLISHER - The Amateur is Charlie Heller, a modest man, a back-room functionary employed by the CIA. His specialty, and his private intellectual obsession, is cryptology - encoding and decoding with the aid of sophisticated computers the thousands of messages that link East and West in their continual efforts to read each other's minds. But Charlie Heller is no Cold Warrior . . not yet. Untangling codes for the CIA is Heller's way of paying the rent and of gaining access to the CIA's immense computer, through which he pursues his gentleman's hobby: searching all of Shakespeare's works to find the elusive cryptogram he believes will reveal their true author. It's a quest Charlie pursues with all the dogged, sometimes brilliant inspiration of a dedicated amateur until, suddenly, his calm life is shattered forever. Summoned one day by his superiors at the CIA, Charlie is informed that during an attack on the American Embassy in West Germany, a terrorist has brutally and senselessly murdered his fiancEe, a hostage in the Embassy Heller's shock and grief turn to unbearable bitterness when he is led to understand that for some incomprehensible reason there has been a high-level decision within the Agency not to pursue the terrorist responsible, Horst Schiller, or to avenge the murder. Obsessed by the necessity of seeking revenge, Charlie ingeniously - and at enormous risk - blackmails his Agency superiors into training and outfitting him to surreptitiously slip behind the Iron Curtain to find, and kill, Schiller. After a grudgingly granted crash course in stealth and murder at the Agency's training school, Heller is deposited on the Czechoslovakian border. Simultaneously the Agency professionals -for whom it was only a matter of time - defuse Heller's blackmail scheme and determine with complete ruthlessness that Heller, no longer a threat to security and now somewhat of an embarrassment, is to be eliminated immediately . . permanently Alone now and deep in Communist Czechoslovakia, Heller faces two highly skilled and deadly opponents - the terrorist Horst Schiller and the CIA. inventory #2940 ISBN: 0671418734.