Books |
The Sleeper
Christopher Dickey
By
Published: Jan 01, 2004
Category:
Fiction
Alfred Hitchcock said the way to make movies that frighten people is to give them a fear bigger than the fears they live with every day. That was pretty much what Christopher Dickey, Newsweek’s Bureau Chief in Paris, set out to do in his first novel, “Innocent Blood.” It didn’t work out that way.
But let him tell it:
This book scares the hell out of me, and I wrote it. ‘Innocent Blood’ was meant to be a warning about the very real dangers, very close at hand, that threaten America. I started work on it in early 1994 after doing months of intense investigative work on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. There would be more terrorism in America, I thought. It would come to the heartland. And because so much counter-terrorist thinking was based on racist stereotypes, a blond, blue-eyed ‘all-American’ killer would be almost invisible to the system. So I set the beginning of the novel in Kansas, in a town not far from the Oklahoma border, and I created a profile of a young man trained to kill by the U.S. Army — a Ranger, a Gulf War veteran — who feels a void in himself that he cannot admit. Then he comes to believe an act of terror can help him fill it.
I had written half the book in April 1995 when I got a call from Newsweek’s New York headquarters telling me the Federal Building in Oklahoma City had been blown up. I didn’t change the story to adapt to events. I didn’t need to. If Timothy McVeigh and Kurt Kurtovic have a lot in common, it’s not a strange coincidence. There are so many people like them in the world, individuals with terrible intent answerable only to their own ideas of God and justice…The only long-term defense we have, I believe, is to try to understand the minds behind the terror.
“Innocent Blood,” the first novel in Dickey’s “terrorism trilogy,” came out in 1997. It told Butler — who admires Dickey’s journalism and knows him just well enough to have the occasional dinner in Paris — that this guy has a massive gift for reality-based fiction. That understates: Christopher Dickey writes rings around Tom Clancy and almost all of the bestselling guys who write thrillers in which politics and violence intersect. But because Dickey doesn’t pump books out like the Clancys of the world, “Innocent Blood” is ranked om the basement on Amazon.com. If there were justice in bookworld, it would be in the low hundreds — and you’d find “Innocent Blood” in every airport bookrack in America.
“The Sleeper” — the just-published second book in the trilogy — is your chance to catch up. You don’t need to go back? Nope. Because Dickey assumes nothing, he neatly summarizes “Innocent Blood” for you in a page. Writing in Kurt Kurtovic’s voice — as he did in the first book — Dickey takes us through Kurt’s Army training, his conversion to Islam, his experiences in Bosnia, his decision to make the United States “feel the pain of the rest of the world” and his never-publicized heroism in stopping a plot that would have killed untold Americans.
“The Sleeper” begins — when else? — on 9/11. Kurt is no longer the killing machine who saw Osama once in Bosnia and worked with al-Qaeda. He’s living in peace and anonymity with his wife and young daughter in Westfield, Kansas. He has seen through the violence of the fanatics: “It is the builders who find their way to Paradise, if there is a Paradise.” Then he turns on the “Today” Show. One of the towers of the World Trade Center is burning. Now the second.
Kurt knows why. Kurt knows who. And Kurt knows there will soon be a knock on his door.
Eight days later, he is in London. And from there “The Sleeper” is a ride on the order of “The Bourne Supremacy” — Kurt races through Britain, Spain and Africa at a hellacious pace. He’s hunting al-Qaeda. But he’s also being hunted.
The action is tense, the violence ugly and, sadly, journalistically accurate. The dialogue snaps. The men are dangerous. Trust does not exist. Death is cheap, and there are many willing to deliver it — and meet it. Read it at night, and you’ll feel you should check the door locks.
Who wants to stop Kurt? On this all-important matter, the book jacket says more than it should. Let’s leave it at this: “The Sleeper” should give domestic intelligence agencies and American politicians as little comfort as it gives foreign-born terrorists.
There are alarm bells in the night; we’ve conditioned ourselves not to hear them, lest we wake from the dream we’re living in, the dream that tells us it’s going to be alright somehow. And maybe we’re smart to do that. Could any of this book’s readers could be as decisive as Kurt? As resourceful? As cold? As effective?
You see the problem I’m having: I think “The Sleeper” is real. Because it’s so good — so fast-paced, so sure-footed, so vividly violent — it’s hard to consign it to the fiction bin. This has to be the way it really works in the shadowy zone where men kill and are killed without a word in the newspapers. An action-packed story with a character Tom Cruise could play — there has to be more to it than that.
I suspect that, as he was in “Innocent Blood,” Dickey is once ahead seeing into the future. How scary is that? At 288 pages, it won’t take you long to find out.
