Bonds of disloyalty.(Code Cicada)(Book review)

Code Cicada, by Warren Reed; HarperCollins, 2004, $19.95.

IT'S RARE to encounter politically sophisticated works of fiction with a thriller bent that are set in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. So it's a real pleasure to come across the new novel by Warren Reed, Code Cicada--set in the world of intelligence and counter-intelligence and involving the Australians, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesians and, of course, the Americans (FBI as well as CIA).

There's one plot involving the bugging of the Chinese embassy in Australia--all too realistic, as it turns out. There's another plot involving a senior Australian spy (an operative in ASIS--the Australian Secret Intelligence Service) who turns traitor, and the efforts made by the Australians to plug the leak, whipped along by a cast of Americans. And there's a highly realistic plot involving a Japanese discovery of natural gas fields and the commercial-cum-political dealing that goes on as they seek to gain maximum leverage from the discovery. All these plots are intertwined in a beautifully crafted story that picks up pace towards the end as it moves towards a real "thriller" climax in Indonesia.

This is Reed's first novel (and probably there are more to come) and it is a brilliant debut. He is himself a "retired" ASIS official--and I put retired in quotes because he was forced out of the organisation by the sort of bungling incompetence that is described all too realistically in the novel. Reed's real experiences--which were aired publicly on Australian television last July on Channel Nine's Sunday program--are well disguised in the novel, but they give it an edge and a realism that can only be secured by real involvement.

The novel's protagonist, Greg Mason, a Japanese-speaking former ASIS operator who was forced out of the organisation by exactly the sort of cover-blowing incompetence that Reed had to endure, is at the time the novel opens a freelance operator in Japan. He is hired by a Japanese corporation to assist them in their efforts to promote their gas interests, and at the same time by the CIA to assist them in uncovering the Australian "mole" who has revealed the bugging of their embassy to the Chinese. The two projects become inextricably linked, as Mason closes in on his target.

The mole, who is introduced to us in the novel's opening pages under the name Peter Phillips, is being hunted by Mason and the combined undercover FBI/CIA operation in Australia, and much of the novel's tension turns on the issue of just who he really is. We are introduced to the cast of possible suspects, and are fed insights into their possible motives through their behaviour as well as the various theories entertained by Mason and his colleagues. This is an extraordinarily effective plot device, for it lends an intellectual tension to the novel--in much the same way as the hunt for the murderer proceeds in an Agatha Christie mystery. But in Reed's case the suspects and the hunters are undercover agents who will pay ...