BOOK REVIEW: World of ‘evolved terror’

THE SIEGE

By Stephen White

Dutton. 394 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Patrick Anderson

Since Sept. 11, 2001, as antiterrorism experts have sought to anticipate and prevent new terrorist attacks, many novelists have offered their fictional versions of what our enemies might try next. Tom Clancy, in “The Teeth of the Tiger,” imagined coordinated suicide raids on American shopping malls. Alex Berenson, in “The Silent Man,” showed terrorists smuggling the components of a crude nuclear device into this country. Now we have Stephen White’s gripping “The Siege,” the best and most interesting terrorism thriller I’ve seen so far, in which a diabolical and murderous terrorist scheme unfolds on the campus of a great American university.

The novel is set on the Yale campus in New Haven, Conn. A terrorist (or terrorists; we know nothing about him or her or them) manages to take hostage 20 or more students inside the fortress-like “tomb” of Book & Snake, one of the university’s venerable old secret societies.

The students vanish on a Thursday night. On Friday their families — many of them prominent in politics, law and finance — begin receiving ominous letters. Not until Saturday morning do the terrorists show their hand. A student emerges from the tomb with a bomb strapped to his middle. “I will die in five minutes,” he says. After five minutes the bomb explodes. Later, other hostages are released unharmed, but refuse to tell police anything, apparently lest others still captive be killed.

This pattern continues. More captives are killed in full view of a national television audience, while others are freed. The terrorists issue none of the usual demands for money or prisoners freed or access to the media. Something new is unfolding.

Soon we readers are struggling with at least three questions. Who are these terrorists? What do they want? And can law enforcement possibly enter the seemingly impenetrable fortress of the Book & Snake tomb to rescue the remaining students? Who they are we don’t know until the book’s final pages. What they want slowly becomes clear but cannot be revealed here, except to say that they wish great harm to America.

Can they be thwarted? In Mr. White’s account, both the New Haven police and the FBI are baffled by the mysterious and formidable terrorists. His heroes are three outsiders, operating freelance on the fringes of the action. Two of them are Dee and Poe. Dee is a female CIA analyst. Poe is an FBI agent. He was badly injured in the Oklahoma City bombing; they met there when she interviewed him and they have become lovers, although she is married. Their relationship — his need for her, her guilt over the affair — is one of the best things in the book: mature, funny and heartbreaking all at once.

Neither has an official role in New Haven; he’s a lone-wolf operative, there because he’s drawn to the horror of the situation; she’s there to give him the emotional support he needs. (Plus she’s terribly smart.) They’re joined by a suspended police detective from Colorado named Sam Purdy who has gone to New Haven at the urgent request of the mother of one of the hostages.

Purdy is a capable cop but a slob — Mr. White’s Everyman, apparently — and for much of the time he’s wandering around the Yale campus in near-total ignorance of what’s happening. Finally he joins up with Dee and Poe and these three outsiders prove to have more insight into the complex situation they face than the blundering local police or the arrogant FBI officials.

The novel is too long, and we learn more than we need to know about Purdy’s love of hockey and his pregnant girlfriend, but we keep reading eagerly both because of Mr. White’s dynamite plot and because he’s offering some sophisticated ideas about what he calls “the evolution of terrorism.” He speaks scornfully of the Department of Homeland Security whose operatives, he remarks are still “frisking Grandma.” Rather, Poe, who was badly injured by one terrorist attack and is deeply pained by this one, says: “But imagine a different world. A world of evolved terror. Imagine we’re confronting terrorists who are using their brains instead of looking at recipes on the Internet and building fertilizer bombs. Imagine we’re confronting a guy who’s as smart as the brightest one of us. … Imagine that this new terrorist has destructive, horrendous dreams that are as grand as our grandest dreams for our children.” He has created that sort of terrorist and it is to his credit that when the perpetrators are finally unveiled, they are not monsters but reasonable people whose motives are entirely understandable. Mr. White’s novel is as alarming as it is readable, and while he provides a more or less happy ending to his siege he makes clear that we can’t count on that in real life.

Patrick Anderson’s most recent book, “The Triumph of the Thriller,” was nominated for the Edgar and Anthony awards.