Walking back the cat

Littell plunges the reader behind the headlines and into a mesmerizing post-cold war world where reactivated KGB agents, CIA operatives and Apaches combine forces to unravel a double-cross, retracing the operation to find the source of the deception - in espionage lingo, walking back the cat. A Soviet-era KGB agent code-named Parsifal lives under deep cover in a small town in New Mexico, adjacent to a Apache reservation. A specialist in what the KGB describes as "wetwork" and the rest of the world calls murder, Parsifal discovers, after years of dormancy, that he has a new "Resident" - and he is given assassination orders that lead him to the nearby Apache-run casino. Meanwhile Finn, a disillusioned Gulf War vet who has come to New Mexico for some R & R gets drawn into the web when he discovers that someone is shaking down the casino.