Algis Budrys
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I'm looking for a good Cold-War era spy novel.
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Here's a rather small paperback - 160 pages: Algis Budrys' "Who".
There's an explosion in West Berlin, very near the wall. An accident in a lab conducting military research. Rescue teams rush to the scene to save the survivors and the Russian "medical" unit gets there first. They whisk away the survivors. Among them is a top American scientist, who possesses extremely important knowledge and information about western military programs.
The U.S. immediately lodge a protest and demand that their man is handed back immediately. The Russians fret and delay, offering various "medical" reasons. In the end, they release their patient/prisoner to the Americans. But is it really him? The face is so severely damaged that it is practically a mask. In those pre-DNA days, the fingertips match but what does that prove? And even if the body is his, what happened to the man himself, his identity and his soul?
Can he really be allowed back? To do everything he did in his previous life?
A man from the U.S. government is assigned to make sure the man really is who he -and the Russians- claim he is.
We cut back to the day a young American, a brilliant high school student full of hopes, leaves home to work his way through college. The book begins.
Mickey Brausch
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