cover image Red Chameleon

Red Chameleon

Charles Robertson. Bantam Books, $3.95 (464pp) ISBN 978-0-553-25246-0

From the author of The Elijah Conspiracy and The Omega Deception, this espionage thriller finds its intrigue in the high-tech, high security world of Silicon Valley Star Wars defense contracts. Aleks Karpenkov, son of a Russian mother and a father who is a U.S. army colonel, hates all things American, and is the most secret, deadly, and productive of KGB agents. The U.S. is close to perfecting a particle-beam Star Wars defense, and Gordon Hardwick, CIA operative, is assigned to tighten up the lax security at Ameronics Corp., which is building the next-generation supercomputer that will track and destroy enemy missiles. Karpenkov's beat is Silicon Valley, and it is obvious a third of the way through the book that this mystery figure is one of the top people at Ameronics, or its parent company, TMK. It even seems obvious exactly who he is, and though the ending provides a surpriseKarpenkov is not the man the reader has assumed for half the bookless curious readers may not make it to the not-very-surprising ending. November