The Parsifal Mosaic

On a dark night a deserted beach on Spain's Costa Brava, a blond woman races across the sand, the sounds of the crashing surf and gunfire intermingling. She is hit repeatedly, and sprawls on the edge of the coastal road, while high above, crouched in shadows, her lover watches the terrible violence below. He satisfies himself that the woman is dead, and disappears into the night. Who is this woman? Why was she killed, and above all, why does Michael Havelock, a veteran field agent for a clandestine branch of the U.S. State Department, who deeply loves her, witness the killing with resignation and even relief? Why, especially, since three months later he sees the same woman rushing across a crowded platform in Rome's central train station? These are the questions that haunt the Parsifal Mosaic, a novel in which Robert Ludlum, author of such number one best sellers as the Holcroft Covenant and the Bourne Identity, once again masterfully weaves a riveting tale of espionage and intrigue at the highest and lowest levels of international deception. At the center of the action is Michael Havelock- born Mikhail Havlicek in the Czech village of Lidice and smuggled out of Prague and into America at the age of twelve. By the time he is twenty eight Havelock has earned a Ph D from Princeton and become the protege of Anton Matthias, a fellow Czech and brilliant geopolitical thinker. Matthias, who is no less than a surrogate father to Michael, long ago understood the furies that propelled his graduate student to forgo an academic career for that of a brutally effective deep cover agent, specializing in espionage and defection. But after sixteen years the tensions of underground service have exhausted Havelock. When he meets Jenna Karas, a Czech national assigned to him in Prague, he feels his life is about to change. Soon they are deeply in love, and Havelock feels the torments of his early life fading. This is a fast-paced and complex novel.