coolreads# Retro Books# The Moscow Vector

The Moscow Vector
Authors: Robert Ludlum & Patrick Larkin
Publisher: Orion Books
iSBN: 9780752877020
Year Published: 2005

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, many believe that Robert Ludlum and other spy craft authors would quietly fade away, since they have no credible villain to frame a novel around. These sceptics forgot that evil always exists and that it merely takes on different forms.

Hence Ludlum's books continued to be published and - as is evident by The Moscow Vector and its predecessors - even survived his passing, with the able assistance of Patrick Larkin.

The Moscow Vector is another Covert-One novel. Covert-One was a concept created by Ludlum shortly before his death. It is a secret organisation answering only to the President of the United States, a group that quietly goes about the business of protecting the government and principles upon which it is built while operating outside of it.

The Moscow Vector is in a class of its own in the series not because of the principals involved, who include the reliably competent Colonel Jon Smith - the Army doctor and virologist, and the quietly enchanting but dangerous Fiona Devlin, operating under the journalist cover. Nor the bad guys like Wulf Renke, the mad scientist whom Victor Dudarev, the President of Russia, employed to bring about the reinstitution of the Soviet Union with the involuntary involvement of the former member states.

However, the real star of the story is the ingeniously dangerous weapon created by Renke that Dudarev is using to put his plan into motion. It is a bio-weapon developed under the project HYDRA, tailored to strike a particular individual's DNA, hence destroying silently and insidiously from within, while leaving no trace of its passage.

At an international conference in Prague, Smith is contacted by a Russian colleague, Dr Valentine Petrenko. Petrenko is concerned about a small cluster of mysterious deaths in Moscow and about the Russian government's refusal to release publicly any information or data on the outbreak. When the two meet, they are attacked by a group of mysterious armed men and Petrenko is killed. His notes and medical samples are lost, and Smith barely escapes with his life.

At the same time, a series of government officials around the world are coming down with a mysterious illness with a 100% fatality rate. These deaths are somehow related to the increasing militarism from the new Russian government, headed by the autocratic and ambitious Dudarev.

Since the lethal bio-weapon is targeted at the US intelligence analysts, the duly-elected leaders of the former Soviet satellites and also the US president, Smith and Covert-One must quickly unravel the source of this mysterious plot. They are in a race against time, not only to prevent Dudarev from hatching his plot, but also to stop the implementation of the bio-weapon as it moves, slowly but quietly, into place in the White House.

Larkin's competent storytelling abilities are augmented here by an ingenious weapons concept that is all the more frightening because of its believability. The Moscow Vector is an excellent book as Larkin brings Ludlum's Cold War villains full circle with a 21st century weapon to boot. A recommended read.